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THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE. 
ADRIFT ON AN ICE-PAN. lUustrated. 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
Boston and New York 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 



mj 



THE 
ADYENTUEE OF LIFE 

BEING THE 

William 2&eiiien i^oBIe Eertureief 

FOR 1911 
BY 

WILFRED THOMASON GRENFELL 

M.D, (OxoN.), C.M.G. 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

1912 



t<v 



-0^ 






COPYRIGHT, I913, BY WILFRED THOMASON GRKNFELL 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Pmhlished March rgj2 



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gCl.A309558 



THE WILLIAM BELDEN NOBLE LECTURES 

Tms Lectureship was constituted a perpetual foundation 
in Harvard University in 1898, as a memorial to the late 
William Belden Noble of Washington, D. C. (Harvard, 
1885). The deed of gift provides that the lectures shall be 
not less than six in number, that they shall be delivered 
annually, and, if convenient, in the Phillips Brooks House, 
during the season of Advent. Each lecturer shall have 
ample notice of his appointment, and the publication of each 
course of lectures is required. The purpose of the Lecture- 
ship will be further seen in the following citation from the 
deed of gift by which it was established : — 

" The object of the founder of the Lectures is to continue 
the mission of William Beldeu Noble, whose supreme desire 
it was to extend the influence of Jesus as the way, the truth, 
and the life ; to make known the meaning of the words of 
Jesus, *I am come that they might have life, and that they 
might have it more abundantly.* In accordance with the 
large interpretation of the Influence of Jesus by the late 
Phillips Brooks, with whose religious teaching he in whose 
memory the Lectures are established and also the founder 
of the Lectures were in deep sympathy, it is intended that 
the scope of the Lectures shall be as wide as the highest in- 
terests of humanity. With this end in view, — the perfection 
of the spiritual man and the consecration by the spirit of 
Jesus of every department of human character, thought, and 
activity, — the Lectures may include philosophy, literature, 
art, poetry, the natural sciences, political economy, sociology, 
ethics, history both civil and ecclesiastical, as well as theology, 
and the more direct interests of the religious life. Beyond 
a sympathy with the purpose of the Lectures, as thus defined, 
no restriction is placed upon the lecturer." 



TO MY WIFE 



PREFACE 

I SHOULD like to preface these lectures 
which I am about to deliver by a brief fore- 
word concerning the man in whose memory 
they have been founded. William Belden 
Noble was unknown to me personally, while 
probably some of you at least had the 
advantage of his acquaintance. I think I 
can truly say, however, that I am conscious 
of his friendship. A life like his makes him, 
like Kim, a friend of all the world. 

He loved the things I love: football and 
athletic games. He was human in social 
relations and a member of clubs which, 
had I been at Harvard, I should have 
wished to join. He worked and played 
and loved — hard. His was just a strenu- 
ous, natural human life. And in addition 
to all this, but not in spite of it, he had 
the vision of the real value of life. He 
ranked high at college. It cannot be said 
that it was lack of intellectual ability which 
gave him the faith, which I hold is of more 
value than anything else on earth. 



X PREFACE 

So I am fully persuaded, not only that 
William Belden Noble lived, but that he 
still lives the imperishable life of those 
through whom the life of God is manifested. 

Those are the alumni of Harvard who 
will ever be among her benefactors. Have 
you no debt to her and to those who shall 
fill your places when you too shall have 
"passed beyond the bourne of time and 
place"? See that you strive to discharge 
your indebtedness while you can. If of the 
gold and silver some of you may be able to 
give her, there is that which has cost you 
both in labor and life, to you who give, 
that shall sweeten tenfold the joy of giving. 
But that which alone all of us can give, and 
which all of us must give if, like William 
Belden Noble, we are to be worthy to be 
remembered as her sons, is what her truest 
counselor, Phillips Brooks, asked of you, 
— the gift of yet one more regenerate^ 
human life. 

Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D* 

December, 1911. 



CONTENTS 

I. Life and Faith 1 

II. Christ and the Individual . . • 39 

HE. Christ and Society 80 

IV. Christ and the Daily Life . . 120 



THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 



LECTURE I 

LIFE AND FAITH 

The object of the Noble Lectures, as I 
conceive it, is decidedly a practical one. It 
is that something may be said, and in such 
a way that it shall induce in the minds of 
the hearers a keener desire to stand for just 
those things which Christ did stand for. It 
is to beget a determination to reincarnate 
his life, in the conviction that so our brief 
tenure of human life may be most useful, 
most completely fulfill the purpose for 
which it was given, and so attain the whole 
achievement of which it is capable. 

I cannot but realize the difficulty of the 
problem presented, while at the same time 
I entirely believe in the supreme importance 
of it. I appreciate most deeply the honor 
that I should be asked to attempt the task. 



ft THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

I must be enjoying much the same sensa- 
tion as the diminutive Jack when he stood 
before the giant's gate, which is exactly 
my idea of the "joie de vivre/' 

The choice of the medical profession as 
a lifework should of itself be a guarantee 
that one looks upon human life as worth 
while. For it is scarcely conceivable that 
one should devote his entire stay on earth 
to the effort to discover and carry out 
methods for preserving and prolonging 
that which he considered practically value- 
less. Being unskilled in philosophy and 
theology, the method I propose to adopt 
in these lectures is bound to be empirical, 
and may possibly appear egotistic. As I do 
in purely professional work, so now, I can, 
I believe, best argue from my own experi- 
ence as to what I think may be helpful to 
others. I recognize, however, that there 
are spiritual and mental variations in hu- 
man minds corresponding to well-known 
physical differences known to medicine as 
idiosyncrasy, and I can only plead for 



LIFE AND FAITH 3 

indulgence if I am guilty of judging others 
too much by myself. 

I therefore begin my first lecture by stat- 
ing that I am an intense believer in life as an 
asset of incomparable value. I cannot re- 
member the day when I had not a passion 
for life, — it seemed so full of adventure. 
Stimulated by trophies of Indian jungles 
which had been sent back by our uncles and 
which graced our home, I decided, almost 
before I learned my alphabet, that the pro- 
fession of tiger-hunting was the only one 
worthy of the name. Indeed, all my lean- 
ings, hereditary or otherwise, were towards 
a life of action. My forebears have almost 
all been physical fighters, and I presume 
I could hardly have escaped the heritage 
of a hatred for peace and platitudes. An 
English public school only emphasized in 
my mind the conviction that physical con- 
tests were the most desirable in which to 
excel. It never occurred to me that the 
boys who labored at their books could have 
discovered a field for adventure. I did not 



4 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

for one moment think that they were 
worthy of anything but the general con- 
temptuous opinion so aptly expressed in 
the names by which we knew them. 

It was in London, when I was first on 
my own allowance, and free from any super- 
vision of body or mind, that I discovered 
that mental activities offered a chance for 
adventure as real and as worthy as any 
physical field. There I began to appreciate 
the value of knowledge because it enabled 
one to do things. When in the operating 
theatre I watched men familiarly and with 
confidence achieving magnificent results 
in relieving pain, prolonging life, and re- 
storing capacities by their masterly mental 
qualifications, life seemed suddenly to loom 
up ten times as attractive as I had ever 
dreamed it could be. But there was a 
larger realm of thought which no one could 
fully comprehend. Many of my teachers 
were men with wide reputations, who were 
to me almost as demigods, but among them 
there was a vast difference of opinion on 



LIFE AND FAITH 5 

this subject. Some were silent, all were 
reticent regarding it. 

The ordinary exponents of the Christian 
faith had never succeeded in interesting 
me in any way, or even in making me 
believe that they were more than profes- 
sionally concerned themselves. Religion 
appeared to be a profession, exceedingly 
conventional, and most unattractive in my 
estimation, — the very last I should have 
thought of selecting. I considered it effemi- 
nate, and should have strongly resented the 
imputation, and felt heartily ashamed, if 
any one of my companions had suggested 
that I was a pietist. I am not excusing my 
position: I am stating it. I made an ex- 
ception of the home religion of my mother, 
which I simply put in a category by itself. 

I was attracted one day by the excite- 
ment of an enormous crowd outside a tent. 
I was living at that time in Whitechapel, 
in the sordid purlieus of which the famous 
Jack the Ripper was contemporaneously 
carrying on his profession. One saw every 



6 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

kind of evil, and every variety of wrecked 
humanity, but among many vanquished, 
some victors. The fight between good and 
evil in the individual was always an evident 
fact. It never occurred to me that I must 
at some time, willy-nilly, enter consciously 
into the same arena. I went into the tent, 
and there I heard a plain common-sense 
man talking in a plain intelligible way to 
a huge concourse of really interested people. 
The man made me feel in all he said that at 
least he had thrown every ounce of himself 
uito the issue. In a most matter-of-fact but 
kindly way, he pulled up a long-winded 
prayer-bore, who was irritating the audi- 
ence with droning platitudes, and the 
Almighty by conferring quite unnecessary 
information upon him. He even cut short 
the choir and braved the organist, when 
he realized that their silence helped more 
than their art. He ended with an address, 
the simplicity of which left no doubt in 
any man's mind that he was a fighter for 
the practical issues of a better and more 



LIFE AND FAITH 7 

cheerful life on earth, a believer in a possible 
life of big achievement for every soul of 
us, both here and hereafter. His self-fori 
getful appeal for help left a determination 
in my heart at least. Perhaps I had been 
wrong in considering the main object of the 
preaching profession to be preferment 
rather than social uplift. It was a revela- 
tion, it opened a new vision, and I guessed 
for the first time the meaning in the eyes 
of the knights of chivalry in familiar famous 
pictures. Somehow religion as an insurance 
ticket had never interested me. The selfish- 
ness and even cowardice of that appeal, to 
which I had so often listened, now loomed 
up in the worse light of distrust. That which 
I had called faith was after all unfaith. The 
new faith which there dawned on me for 
the first time was not the conviction that 
God would forgive me, but that he had 
already given me things of which I had 
not even known ; not that he would save me, 
but that he would use me. I went out with 
yet a third field for adventure before me. 



8 THE AD\T:XTURE OF LIFE 

and far the largest, to add to the glor}' and 
beauty of life. 

A new factor which now forced itself 
upon me was my will. I beheved in free 
will: it seemed common sense. I knew that 
materialists did not, and that most of my 
comrades believed in Darwin and Huxley, 
and in the teaching that we are all slaves of 
unbreakable laws, I believed that I was at 
the fork of two roads, and could go down 
the one which I liked. For mv venture I 
wanted knowledge. At that time I thought 
nothing of reading just as late at night as 
I could stay awake with a wet towel round 
my head; but I recognized limits to my 
capacity. I was forced to admit that there 
were some things too high for me. And yet 
— I must go ahead. Only thus will any 
man find his field for adventure. Courage 
and every noble virtue, and everj' idea of 
the romantic, worth-while world in which 
I live would be gone, if I did not believe 
in free will. ''After all, it is not that we 
strive to do the impossible, but that which 



LIFE AND FAITH 9 

to the self of mere experience looks im- 
possible.'' ^ 

I was prejudiced for an adventurous 
world. The other dull material world was 
unbearable to me anyhow. Science taught 
us that the phenomena of life worked out 
in an orderly manner; and that from ob- 
serving the facts governing that order, cer- 
tain results were discernible. The embryo 
of an egg developed wings and flew. A 
similar embryonic cell in the ocean grew 
fins and swam. The processes never got 
mixed and no human being could alter 
them. Some men who posed as scientists 
(that is, those who knew) talked as if "na- 
ture'' or the '^laws of nature" controlled 
all these wonderful things. They were so 
familiar with them that they might almost 
have invented them. But the "forces of 
nature/' the force that is outside ourselves 
thenceforth to me spelled "God." It is 
merely a fact that no man, however much 
he wishes, can really make mystery a bar 
to faith. 

^ Bishop Brent, Leadership, 



10 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

All business has to be conducted to some 
extent on a credit basis. The same system 
applies occasionally in the realm of thought ; 
and I am justified in using it in the sphere 
of convictions. I am convinced that this 
is a case in which wisdom is justified of her 
children. In Ottaw^ there is a statue of 
Sir Galahad, erected to the memory of a 
young man who, seeing two skaters fall 
through the ice on the Ottawa River, sprang 
in to save them and was drowned himself. 
On the granite base of the statue are carved 
the young knight's words, "If I save my 
life I lose it." Reason may say he was a 
fool, but is that wisdom.? When the Lake 
Erie steamer caught fire, in order to save 
the passengers it became necessary to steam 
fuU-spead ahead to the nearest beach. The 
flames drove the passengers forward. Some 
one must stay at the wheel to steer, or all 
would be drowned or burned. The keel 
struck the beach just in time. But when 
they looked for the helmsman, Robert 
Marsden, only a common sailor, they found 



LIFE AND FAITH 11 

him dead, his blackened body lying sunk 
down on its knees in the chart-room; he 
himself had lashed his hands to the wheel. 
The Master was ridiculed as a madman; 
but the Greeks did not blame Achilles for 
his choice. Are all heroism, all impulsive 
nobility, all honor, because they are unrea- 
sonable, to be classed as folly, and to be 
sneered at? 

Once in a heavy cross-loop on the Dogger 
Bank, the forestay of our schooner suddenly 
broke. While I was reasoning out what to 
do, the skipper had her before the wind, re- 
lieved the pressure at once, and saved the 
mainmast, and probably our lives. A snap 
judgment, an instinctive decision, is not 
necessarily an unreasonable one. 

For my part, I came to see I must start 
somewhere, and stand on some basis. 
Should I stand on the current knowledge of 
the early eighties, which was about as stable 
as a Labrador bog and has already gone 
the way of flesh, or should I stand on faith.? 
Down which road should I go? Whether 



12 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

demonstrably intellectually correct or not, 
I decided I would prefer and therefore 
would try to follow the Christ. 

What is the explanation of the biased or 
even bitter spirit in which many men deal 
with the claim of Christianity to their 
attention? In medicine and in all other 
branches of science we are at best supposed 
to bring our problems to the bar of our in- 
telligence, without a bias for proving or dis- 
proving, but simply to find the truth. I have 
had men come in the middle of the night, 
come many miles, incur considerable ex- 
pense, just to discuss prolonging the life 
of a patient, who had no more claim on 
them than that he was a fellow man in dis- 
tress. Their sole desire was to get wisdom 
for action, and they considered it a mean 
thing to worry one iota about the trouble 
involved in the attempt to prolong mortal 
life. The very men who strain at gnats 
when it is a question of real life, swallow 
a camel when it relates to mere animal 
existence. 



LIFE AND FAITH 13 

Among other odd things which struck 
one with regard to the acceptance of Christ- 
ianity as a method of life was the fact that 
the people to decry it most loudly as a rem- 
edy were those who had never tried it at 
all. The loudest denouncers of a remedy 
for the body should be those who have 
tried it without prejudice and found it a 
failure. It is considered unscientific and 
irrational for a man to do more than re- 
main silent about a remedy he has not tried 
personally. If, however, he were to form 
his opinion by watching others try it, 
it would be equally unscientific to judge 
of the experiment unless he were assured 
it was the unadulterated remedy he was 
seeing used. Those who have studied 
Christ's own teachings for themselves, and 
seen his varied methods tried for human- 
ity's sins and sorrows, have never been dis- 
appointed. Most of us must find God, if 
at all, in the experiences of everyday life. 
One cause is almost alone enough to justify 
and quite suflScient to explain the attitude 



14 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

of mind in which men of science approach 
the Christian rehgion. For the claim of 
priest and theologian and religious teacher 
of succeeding ages, that their particular 
faith was knowledge and included absolute 
truth, was as demonstrably false as it was 
immodest. "Truth cannot exist in a church 
any more than learning can in a univer- 
sity." Again, their ceaseless attempts to 
stereotype the intellectual and social re- 
lation of every man of all ages according 
to their own conception of what the relig- 
ion of Christ called for has patently held 
back the true advance of the race. They 
captured the title of the Christian Church, 
"vi et armis," just as a knight does the 
token from his adversary's helm, and ar- 
rested the growth of the real church, till 
it became like a miserable stunted cretin, 
for whom for centm-ies no cure was thought 
possible. Moreover, they enforced their 
tenets in a way well calculated to leave 
objectionable impressions on the minds 
of scientists, even if they did escape the 



LIFE AND FAITH 15 

experience of Galileo. No wonder that, as 
McComb says: "People are weary of the 
burden of theological doctrines, and are 
asking for something permanent, something 
verifiable in experience, which no criticism 
can touch and no progress in culture 
wither."^ A young German divine is re- 
ported.to have said, "Christ came to save us 
from the theologians ! " Not to be misunder- 
stood,! would say here that I am myself a 
member of a church, and comforted by the 
fact that the visible church is, willy-nilly, 
enlarging its views as to what it means to 
be a Christian, and is ever more and more 
recognizing the social side of the service of 
the Master. On the other hand, with the 
increase of knowledge, the arrogance of 
current thought is groundless, and the 
scholar no longer believes he has a mono- 
poly of religion. As Peabody has pointed 
out, the scholar has discovered that "the 
conceit of learning arises from not discern- 
ing the dimensions of truth''; and that "the 
* Christianity and the Modem Mind. 



16 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

contest between religion and science now 
interests only a few belated materialists 
and a few overslept defenders of the faith." ^ 
We must reach the hilltop of learning be- 
fore we can hope for the full view. Emer- 
son says, "Talent sinks with character/' 
The Master differs from teachers like Rous- 
seau, for there is no hiatus between his 
precepts and his character. Spiritual 
satiety has been the trouble with many 
scientists, just as men, after a dinner they 
cannot digest, are unable to climb the hill. 
Besides this cause, the heritage of wrong 
aim, the fact of sin, the heirloom of bad 
advertisement also remain. To make men 
enter the church to-day there exists only 
the same road which leads to love for her 
Founder. After an address at the Cooper 
Union in New York, a rabid anti-Christian 
was fiercely heckling the speaker from the 
audience and abusing the church of to-day. 
His arguments were so drastic and yet so 
specious that there was only one way to 
^ Religion of an Educated Man. 



LIFE AND FAITH 17 

answer him. "Are you a member of any 
church?'' the speaker asked. "What are 
you getting at?'' was the astonished reply. 
"Well, I've been for twenty-five years," 
continued the speaker, "and I assure you 
it never encouraged me to rob, to kill, or 
to vilify. If you really want to satisfy your 
mind, I advise you to go and join the 
church, and see for yourself what she 
stands for." The suggestion was so novel 
that the critic rose and walked out. 

On returning to Labrador one spring, I 
chanced to be discussing with a group of 
men on the wharf the reported conver- 
sion of some of the toughest and hitherto 
imtouched characters among the settlers. 
It happened that, like so many others, they 
had been bred to despise the idea of con- 
version, though laboriously drilled in manj^ 
denominational doctrines of doubtful value. 
That a conversion like St. Paul's, which 
meant something practical, could occur 
in the twentieth century, or anywhere out- 
side the Bible, seemed to them ridiculous. 



18 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

There was a lot of looking down and nervous 
kicking the ground when we endeavored to 
talk of it as one would of catching fish. 
They all admitted, however, that the whole 
cove had been altered, and men and women 
entirely changed for the better. Various 
boats with different kinds of apparatus for 
catching fish were coming to and fro from 
the company's wharf as we were talking. 
All were engaged in getting fish for the 
same firm, and all were eager enough to gain 
their end. The fish were not trapping well, 
and the humbler "' hook-and-line '' men were 
the only ones who were getting anything. 
I suggested that it would not be to their 
credit as loyal employees or as men of com- 
mon sense, if the trap-net men should re- 
gard as enemies, or find fault with, or try to 
ridicule, their successful comrades, for using 
methods other than their own. The sug- 
gestion that the adoption of such a course 
of action could possibly be considered a 
fair demonstration of what Christ taught 
at once brought a denial to their lips, and 



LIFE AND FAITH 19 

a side-glance as well to see if I were really 
in earnest. Yet this was exactly the atti- 
tude of one body of Christians to another. 
There was no rejoicing, that I could see, 
that the sole purpose for which their own 
organization avowedly existed was being 
accomplished, but recrimination that it was 
not being accomplished in their way. In 
this case, however, the whole group of men 
immediately indorsed the general prin- 
ciple that different methods were entirely 
necessary in the material world, and also 
that excellent results had been obtained 
in this instance, for which their own sect 
had nominally striven. It had certainly 
failed for so long a period as to endanger 
the desired result being accomplished dur- 
ing the lifetime of the very people who had 
now become new men. 

I could cite many instances where faith 
in Christ has very apparently altered a 
man's whole outlook and action. Naturally, 
most of my observation has been among 
fishermen, and it has included men of al- 



20 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

most every kind of temperament. One was 
a man with whom I afterwards made 
several voyages. A man of exceptionable 
physique, he had been the victim of un- 
controllable temper, and various of his 
drinking sprees had ended in the police 
station, as the result of violent assaults on 
others. He had destroyed his home and his 
wife had left him. He was rapidly ruining 
his own splendid physique, and the lives 
of all those with whom he came in contact. 
Suddenly he became sober and peaceful, 
built up his home again and took back his 
wife, and developed an absolutely unselfish 
passion to try to save his fellows from 
the slavery that had been his. He always 
claimed that his faith in Christ was the 
secret of the change. He was so cheerful 
and so uniformly optimistic that his very 
face became transparent with happiness, 
and I have never had a more delightful 
shipmate. I once asked him to say a word 
to encourage other men. He stood up to 
try, and unaccustomed tears coursed down 



LIFE AND FAITH 21 

his cheeks. At last he said, ^'To think of 
the Hke of me talking to them men/' and 
sat down. This class of men has been well 
illustrated by Mr. Harold Begbie in his 
''Twice-Born Men '' and ''Broken Earthen- 
ware." In my own experience it has been 
multiplied many times. Indeed, I have 
often wondered why so many clergy and 
other workers have asked me whether I 
have read these books, as if the results they 
describe were rare experiences. It is only 
the recording of them that is rare. There 
is a reticence always on the part of all good 
workers to draw deductions from their own 
work prematurely. There can be no ques- 
tion of their occurrence, however, though 
my own experience shows me that these 
more emotionally susceptible men are 
most liable to temporary retrogression. But 
even so, I am devoutly thankful for such 
changes as may occur to change their life 
and environment, changes which I can 
attribute to nothing else but their faith. 
I am certain that any one who, even though 



22 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

without faith himself, though also without 
prejudice, would seek to record such cases 
in the way we record cures of disease, — 
which only affect part of men's lives, — 
would be surprised at the extent and value 
of suddenly acquired faith in the Christ. 

Before leaving my seafaring friends, 
however, I would say that, while the sud- 
denness of the change of habits and of 
life has been unquestioned, the process, it 
has always seemed to me, has been less 
brief than they themselves supposed, and 
the conversion could have been almost as 
justly attributed to many previous experi- 
ences. Yet I ought to add that the majority 
among these fishermen who are endowed 
with the kind of faith that dominates their 
whole life are conscious of the day on which 
it became a potent factor in their lives, — 
a most helpful experience, it always seems 
to me. 

Among those of my own class in life, I 
have been privileged also to see not a few 
very remarkable changes; but the process 



LIFE AND FAITH 23 

has almost always been gradual, and usu- 
ally accomplished through unselfish service, 
which is Christ-following. In men of my 
own profession I have seen just as unmis- 
takably the results of Christian faith. From 
self-indulgent, destructive, wasted lives, 
I have seen them become just such minis- 
ters to humanity as I conceive that Christ 
calls for. Among the unfortunate victims 
of extreme wealth I have known some sud- 
denly accept the Christ's view of steward- 
ship, and without dumping their wealth, 
for which Christ never called, they have 
accepted their responsibilities, and admin- 
istered it with such love and wisdom that 
their renewed lives have entirely stopped 
the mouths of critics. 

I do not believe in labels, but I must ac- 
cept that of utilitarian. For such an atti- 
tude faith is an absolute necessity. At the 
age of nineteen I was living with a clever 
lecturer on the "Evidences for Christian- 
ity.'' His shelves were literally crowded 
from floor to ceiling with scientific and phil- 



24 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

osophical works of every kind, ancient and 
modern. His life and talents were entirely 
devoted to demonstrating that our Christ- 
ian faith was in accord with the scientific 
knowledge of that day. He was popular, 
and I believe to some extent successful in 
influencing men's opinions and lives. Any- 
how, I have seen him carried home on the 
shoulders of a London crowd, and finishing 
his address from our upper window. At 
that same time my own brother, who had 
taken an open scholarship and a brilliant 
*^ first'' in Classics at Oxford, had just fin- 
ished his ''greats" examination in philo- 
sophy. In this, to my infinite surprise, he 
had secured only a second-class. His fault, 
according to the examiners, was his bril- 
liant memory. He had quoted accurately 
the teachings of masters at variance with 
one another to examiners who did not 
agree with any of them. ''Where wise men 
differ, fools may come in," and I rejoiced 
that I felt free to decide to order my life 
on the basis of Christian faith, a position 



LIFE AND FAITH 25 

I have never regretted having adopted. 
Phillips Brooks says somewhere that "'free- 
dom of belief should not mean freedom to 
believe Httle but freedom to beheve much/' 
On a perfectly common-sense basis, I have 
always trusted that when I diflFered from 
the .teachings of creeds and sects, possibly 
I was as likely to be right as they, since I 
had as direct access to and as great a claim 
on the promises of the Giver of all wisdom 
as they. 

There exists an absolutely undeniable 
antipathy on the part of theologian and 
scientist alike to allowing this freedom. 
One says you shall not have it, the other 
says you cannot, though the value of its 
acquisition has the indorsement of thou- 
sands, nay, millions of our fellow men of 
all ages. 

Yet we cannot take up a newspaper 
without seeing accounts of these same men 
suing others for restitution of goods or 
money out of which they have foolishly 
allowed themselves to be swindled. In 



26 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

these cases any judge would like to say to 
them, "You'll get no redress, for it is only 
what you deserve." The same applies 
to matters which affect our lives more 
intimately and permanently. Take, for 
instance, marriage. The ever-increasing 
number of divorces show how these most 
vital and personal relations are undertaken 
without any reference whatever to reason. 
It is the same with our play: aviation, 
motoring, polo, football, cards, billiards, 
etc. We go into them entirely without 
reference to their value to our especial 
temperaments or requirements or capaci- 
ties or physical interests. In food and drink 
the folly and credulity of man is shown in 
the absolutely unreasonable extent to which 
men indulge themselves. Whatever the 
result may be in the brevity or longevity of 
life, these excesses affect every expression 
of mind or spirit as surely as they do the 
physical capacities. It is not unusual for 
the famous Billy Muldoon to announce to 
a new degenerate, ''Sir, you have no mind. 



LIFE AND FAITH 27 

For the next six weeks you will have the in- 
finite advantage of Billy Muldoon's mind/' 
One might multiply these instances in- 
definitely, but the only point I wish to 
urge is that it is these very people who in 
everyday life stigmatize even the man 
whose life has been demonstrably benefited 
by the Christian faith as a fanatic, as a 
man of ill-balanced mind, as credulous. 
But so strange are the contortions of 
mentality that many times men have said 
to me, "I wish I could believe as you do; it 
would be such a help and such a comfort/' 
At the same time I have known men with 
death threatening, and in agony of mind 
for those they must leave behind them, to 
whom I have wished above all else I could 
give that peace and rest which the acqui- 
sition of that faith invariably carries with 
it. But it has been impossible. "Christ's 
appeal is not "primarily to the emotions or 
to the intellect, but to the will." It is not 
that men cannot accept the Christ nearly 
so much as that they will not. 



28 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

One of the causes of this mistrust of the 
Christian faith in men's minds is the age- 
long misrepresentation of it. We have such 
erroneous ideas of what the Christ pleads 
for. "In that unhappy moment, centuries 
ago, when the church set up a metaphys- 
ical text, in place of the standard of moral 
excellence and personal fellowship with 
Christ, it lost its supreme distinction of 
symbolizing the unity of all life in a com- 
mon divine source and in a common im- 
mortal destiny." ^ Such bad advertising as 
Christianity sometimes gets would cer- 
tainly kill the desire even for an Eastman 
kodak or a Winchester rifle. D. L. Moody 
said, ''The Christian is the world's Bible, 
but we often need a revised version.'' 

It was at this decisive point that for the 
first time I realized I was, and puzzled as to 
who I could be, and why I was, and what 
I could do, and where I was bound. Some 
people think the last question is mere silly 
sentiment. But it really is not only most 

^ Paradise, The Church and the Individual, p. 248. 



LIFE AND FAITH 29 

natural but most common sense. In passing 
a vessel at sea we almost always ask first, 
"'Where are you bound?" Somehow that 
actually interests us most. I have found 
that if I know the vessel and have any 
ajBFection for the skipper I am ten times as 
likely to be concerned. I never knew one 
to resent my question, and his answer usu- 
ally closed with ''Where are you.^'' 

Now it so happens that most of my cruis- 
ing has been done in the foggiest region of 
the world, and I myself have often enough 
been for days together in the fog. Because 
the season is short and the distance to be 
covered so great, to get along is always 
a question of first and imperative import- 
ance if we are in any way to satisfy our- 
selves that we have done our duty. It is a 
horrible feeling at the end of the season to 
find one has delayed and had to miss out- 
sections of the work. This is not because 
we have to render account to any one but 
ourselves, but simply because we find that 
we are far less willing to condone any faults 



30 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

or omissions than a master over us would 
be. It therefore happens that often we have 
to run ahead in spite of the fog and take 
the risk. Incidentally these are among the 
most exciting times of our lives. The risk 
itself, the adventure, is the real spice of 
what would otherwise be prosaic and dull. 
Indeed the fact that the coast is badly light- 
ed, poorly charted, and devoid of landmarks 
and buoys on the shoals, not only keeps us 
alive and quickens our capacities but gives 
us a realization of fellowship with our friends 
sailing the same seas. Thus we get a much 
more intelligent love for one another as 
we see each other's fallibility, and we come 
to feel that the work is more worth while 
because it involves adventure, and because 
we have seen that not every man can or 
will "l^nch out.'' 

I must admit, however, that when run- 
ning in the fog the first question on one's 
lips as one sights a fellow voyager is not, 
^^ Where are you bound ?" but "WTiere are 
we?" I remember the first time we were 



LIFE AND FAITH 31 

crossing the Newfoundland Banks. We had 
spent some days in blanketing fog without 
a heavenly or earthly body to give us any 
information about our position. We were 
somewhat anxious, not knowing which 
way to go. Suddenly, a huge three-masted 
ship loomed up out of the fog, apparently 
running off her course with confidence. 
We had time to cut her off and ask where 
we were. She replied by hanging over the 
side a huge blackboard with the approxim- 
ate latitude and longitude on it, and then 
disappeared into the gloom. We were not 
able to prove it, but we trusted her good 
faith and acted as if it were true. We did n't 
in the least resent the suggestion of inter- 
ference in our private affairs. Many and 
many a time since I have had to rely on the 
opinions of others and even their gratui- 
tous help. At one time we were running 
somewhat too confidently on a part of the 
shore which we thought we knew perfectly 
well. Indeed, we were running full speed 
in spite of our inabihty to see. We were 



82 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

suddenly aroused in the wheel house by 
the united shouting of half a dozen sten- 
torian voices, ''Hard a' starboard! Full 
speed astern! — or you'll be ashore." 
These presumptuous people in a trap 
fishing-boat had, quite unasked, interfered 
to make us change our course, and had 
thereby saved us from a catastrophe. It was 
so dense we could not see the breakers. 
However, we found we had made no mis- 
take in instantly acting on the faith that 
they were wiser than we, without waiting 
to argue the rationality of it. But beyond 
this, on yet another occasion in thick 
weather we ran right by a boat full of men 
and almost instantly afterwards sighted 
breakers. We escaped practically by a 
miracle, but we felt badly that the men 
in the boat had not interfered to warn 
us. 

These and every experience of life seem 
to teach that when the question at issue 
is of vital, practical importance to us we 
have no prejudice against outside advice, 



LIFE AND FAITH 33 

and that there is no reason why we should 
not offer such as we may possess, nor why 
we should not accept it and act upon it as 
if it were true, without needing intellectual 
demonstration. 

Dr. Crile has shown that anger, fear, 
love, anxiety render protoplasm granular; 
just as the shaking of steel makes a much- 
worked axle brittle and unreliable, so these 
emotions destroy the cells in the cortex 
of the cerebral hemispheres just as would 
poison or a blow. It is through these im- 
portant cells that the outside world is in- 
terpreted to us. So faith that brings peace, 
is, in any case, a physical desirability if 
not a moral one. 

The man who has no interest in life, its 
meaning and its future, is only intelligible 
to me on one of three hypotheses : either he 
has never faced himself and never stopped 
to think, or he has done it with blind 
eyes and closed ears, or he is no man 
at all. 

I can understand the position of the spec- 



34 THE ADVENTURE OP LIFE 

tator at the great games; being unable to 
play himself, he certainly does his best to 
show his sympathy and give his support 
to the players. He spends much energy 
and at times makes a very fine show. But 
his outlay is more or less pathetic, for he 
is only a spectator after all, — and he is 
so numerous! I know there is no need to 
waste sympathy on the actual players. The 
glory of the game liberally compensates 
them for any damage they may receive. 
The man to whom my sympathy always 
goes out is the substitute, ready and 
anxious to get into the game — but to whom 
the chance is never given to use his capa- 
cities. His loyalty calls for unbounded 
admiration. 

If there is iniquity in accepting a course 
for true, the axioms of which cannot be 
demonstrated by mathematics, this is the 
reason why I rejoice in my iniquity (in 
accepting the Christian faith). My choice 
has given me such fun in life, and still 
promises to do so. For no capacities need 



LIFE AND FAITH 35 

go unused in the field of Christian ad- 
venture. 

I have as much right to my position as 
any man has to unfaith, — and I have the 
deductions of common sense to support 
me. As for the materiaHst, he at least can- 
not blame me. If I am all wrong, I am at 
worst the victim of his own inexorable 
system. When we recognize our finiteness, 
we come to faith as rational. I do not ex- 
pect to see God here, and live. As Chester- 
ton^ has pointed out, though somewhat 
sweepingly, ''Between Hegel who believes 
in nothing but himself and his senses, and 
the materialist who believes not at all in 
his senses,'' stands Christianity as the great 
Modus Vivendi. 

If I were to quote in the classroom the 
words of the Scripture, that the natural 
man does not want the things of the spirit, 
I should probably be hooted at or mildly 
ignored, and yet it is perfectly obvious that 
this is really the case. Even if we know the 
^ G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 



36 THE AD\TENTURE OF LITE 

best path, we wish to walk the one that 
may not cost us anything in everyday life, 
rather than let reason sit master on our 
control. If I were to quote Christ's saying, 
"I came not to send peace, but a sword,'' 
the retort, even if unspoken, would un- 
doubtedly be, ''What did Christ know 
about it?'' Yet the unfailing evidence of 
facts shows every day the inevitableness of 
the contest if the best is to be made of life. 
Life to the Christian sounds a clarion call 
like the last words of Marmion : — 

"Charge, Chester, charge; 
On, Stanley, on." 

Without question unfaith is too often a 
synonym for ''don't want." It is like the 
farmer who, when urged to give up whiskey, 
remarked, "Prove I don't like un, and 
I'll give un up." 

"The great causes of God and humanity 
are not defeated by the hot assaults of the 
Devil, but by the slow, crushing, glacier- 
like mass of thousands and thousands of 
indifferent nobodies. God's causes are never 



LIFE AND FAITH 37 

destroyed by being blown up, but by being 
sat upon. It is not the violent and anarch- 
ical whom we have to fear in the war for 
human progress, but the slow, the staid, 
the respectable. And the danger of these 
lies in their real scepticism. . . . Though 
it would abhor articulately confessing that 
God does nothing, it virtually means so 
by refusing to share manifest opportunities 
of serving Him.'' ^ 

It is not to complain weakly of prejudice, 
to besmirch those w^ho do not believe as I 
do, that I have thus dwelt on the strange 
reluctances in accepting faith as a guide 
for action in matters which relate to our 
highest interest and life. Surely in the 
business world men take ventures with- 
out waiting for intellectual comprehension. 
When the venture is of such vast importance 
as accepting a guide for life's action, when 
the Christian faith has been so unanimously 
approved by those who have really adopted 
it, when there is at least a possibility that 

* George Adam Smith, Minor Prophets, vol. n, p. 54. 



38 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

not only our day of life here but the life in 
eternity will be benefited, why is it irra- 
tional to accept the mystery and stand on 
the ground of ''Lord, I believe. Help thou 
mine unbelief/' 



LECTURE II 

CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 

In my first lecture I endeavored to defend 
the deductions of my own experience, 
namely, that as we all must act the con- 
scious selection of the pathway pointed out 
by Christ is rational : first, because it is the 
most remunerative solution of the prob- 
lem; secondly, the most interesting, as 
affording a sound basis for fighting, for 
loving, and for hoping; thirdly, the most 
manly, as involving hard work with no 
immediate vision of finality; and last, be- 
cause it bases the whole on the satisfactory 
presumption that I am I, and choose this 
course myself. 

I now propose to try and indicate how 
this choice works out in men's lives what- 
ever their temperament or activity. I am 
convinced that no man can truly say, 
"Christ's way succeeds for the man across 



40 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

the street, but not for me.'' I do not argue 
that a man can by his will power make 
himself believe this suddenly, if his edu- 
cation and mentality make him sceptical 
of it, or that any other man can by super- 
ior wisdom convince his mind of the truth 
of it by much talking. But I do contend that 
with however little faith a man starts out 
if he is willing to work on that faith instead 
of arguing he is on a sure road to satisfy 
himself of the truth of it, and eventually 
to know, as far as we can know anything, 
that the Master was and is perfectly right. 
You cannot find the Christ by searching 
with the eye in books and pamphlets; 
you cannot demonstrate him to the ear in 
theological lectures. I have known more 
than one man try these very ways, and 
lose in the process the little faith with 
which he began. The way to find the truth 
about the Christ is to be wilHng to under- 
take the kind of life that common sense 
translates his teachings to mean in this age. 
When at Christ's bidding the paralyzed 



CHRIST AND THE INDIVTOUAL 41 

man found that he could walk, and the 
palsied man that he had strength in his 
arm, and the blind man that he could see 
clearly, they were all convinced of the 
Master's power, — and the cleansed lepers 
acclaimed him before ever they went to 
the priests for confirmation of their cure. 

The popular idea that Christ asks men 
to sit down in life and admire him is absurd 
on the face of it. The greatest Worker the 
world has ever known asks men to be men 
and follow him in the manifold directions 
which always commend themselves to man- 
kind in the supreme moments of life- It is 
not our recognition as we pass on the road 
of life that he desires, but our personal 
loyalty; not vain oblations, but "ceasing 
to do evil and learning to do good/' His 
direct appeal is to our sense for a reasonable 
service. It is always more the appeal of the 
musician than that of the dialectician. The 
ear hears, but the soul interprets. The mu- 
sician does n't argue; he plays, and the 
ear that hears recognizes or interprets the 



42 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

beauty of the message without being driven 
into a hole by words. Alas, for the ears 
to which a Beethoven sonata reveals no 
beauty, or the eyes which cannot see the 
glory of the solar spectrum. To me it is cer- 
tainly the fault of our interpretive faculties 
if we find no attraction in the person of Jesus 
Christ. Just so it is sin or moral perversion 
which prevents flesh and blood revealing 
Christ, and that is why faith is the best 
service we can render humanity. 

A long and varied experience with many 
of the churches has left me confident of the 
wisdom of joining one or other of them. 
None have a monopoly of perfection, but a 
roving life has taught me that when a man 
is hungry he can well afford to overlook 
imperfections in the service, so long as the 
food is good. One morning, after I had 
been addressing a large Bible class, a keen 
young fellow came to the house where I was 
staying and asked for an interview. He 
said: ''I got an entirely new view of what 
Christ really expects of me, and I realized 



CHRIST AND THE INDIVTOUAL 43 

that that is not taught in my church. \Miat 
would you advise me to do?" I told him 
I had had some patients who could n't 
assimilate food even in the form of milk, 
and that I should advise him to go around 
till he found nourishment in some church, 
and then cultivate loyalty to that; not to 
stay out just because it was human and im- 
perfect, but to go in and make it better. 
I find that the cause of the trouble is just 
as often the stomach or constitution as 
the meals, in these days when the public 
also is enlarging its views of what good food 
is, and beginning to insist upon having 
it. While the Master always insisted upon 
faith, he had no severe rebuke for doubt. 
I don't believe any of us would have let 
Thomas off quite so easily. 

Bishop Brent ^ has said: ^^A man's vo- 
cation is the sphere in which to illustrate 
his precepts"; and I now propose in a few 
words to try and show how the Christian 
faith affects my own profession. 

* Brent, Leadership. 



44 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

The temptations of the surgeon are not 
the same as those of the priest or the scholar. 
His special temptations are to think that 
the prolongation of existence limits the 
call of life on him, and affords a field large 
enough for all he can contribute; secondly, 
professional prejudice against lay inter- 
ference. 

Regarding the first point I have never 
doubted that the prolongation of some 
lives is altogether undesirable. One or two 
examples of this type will suflSce. An old 
sailor captain with cancer of the throat, 
which woke him with horrors that some 
one was strangling him as soon as he dozed 
off to sleep, would ask me so piteously at 
night for a lethal draught that I used to 
try and tiptoe past his bed as I went round 
the wards to avoid the pain of having to 
refuse him. A poor fisherman, incm-able 
and mentally degenerate, owing to a creep- 
ing paralysis, is here after six years, killing 
and starving his family, as he, an abso- 
lutely unintelligent mass of flesh and bones. 



CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 45 

lies groaning and moaning in bed. Already- 
one married daughter has died, worn out 
with caring for him and her own young 
family as well. His wife is rapidly sinking 
also. 

Among my patients in hospital to-day 
is a young man of nineteen. He has been 
under my care for eleven months. He has 
tubercular disease of the hip and spine; 
there is no hope of his recovery. We can- 
not keep him, and must instead send him 
home to be a source of physical danger, a 
ruinous expense, and a cause of untold 
mental anguish to his loved ones. In the 
cases of the criminally insane, the tuber- 
cular insane, the hopelessly insane, the 
sufferers in the last stages of incurable dis- 
eases, and others, it is at least open to de- 
bate if a year or more added to their life 
on earth is of any value. It is questionable 
if the same may not be said of the hope- 
less moral degenerate whose vice has in- 
jured him beyond possible physical re- 
covery. The state admits this to a certain 



46 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

extent in the use of capital punishment, and 
in its methods of preventing criminal re- 
production. Theologians as well as materi- 
alists have assented to a limit to the day 
of grace. Pathologists have demonstrated 
the damage caused by the neglect of these 
precautions on the part of the state. I am 
not arguing that it is possible as yet to 
identify the candidates for extinction, but 
that it is not a worthy end for our profession 
in any case to limit their aspirations to 
utility to the prolongation of mortal life. 
To have life is not nearly so important as 
to use it well. Emerson aptly asks, ^^ What 
is the use of eternal life to a man who can- 
not use half an hour of this life well.? '' What 
we have is never so important as what we 
do with what we have. 

The world will, I know, acquit me of 
egotism in claiming for the profession of 
healing a special capacity for influencing 
the whole life of the whole man, if only be- 
cause of the advantages it has in getting 
really close to men when they are apt to be 



CHRIST AND THE INDIVTOUAL 47 

both impressionable and thoughtful, and 
stripped of all conventional restraint. The 
real end of all social service should be to 
build up character; "to educate personal- 
ity is true religion."^ The ideal object of 
the best doctors, lawyers, scholars, priests, 
or indeed of every good man, is in reality 
the same as that of the Master. 

I once carried a plant I had found to 
our professor of botany for identification. 
"Young man,'' he said, "a botanist does not 
know one plant from another." Rousseau 
wrote a standard textbook on how to bring 
up children, and dropped all five of his ow^n, 
on the day they were born, in the post-box 
of the foundling hospital. An aurist pro- 
posed the theory of the telephone, and a 
business man made it of service to the pub- 
lic. But science and utility are coming to- 
gether. It was left to the young University 
of Kansas to risk the opprobrium of having 
prostituted learning to commercialism, by 
appointing an unlimited stafif of industrial 
^ Peabody, Religion of an Educated Man, 



48 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

"Fellows/' the object of each being to 
discover practical values for apparently 
useless products. Through their special 
scientific knowledge they obtained casein 
from buttermilk, diastase from alfalfa 
stalks, pituitin from the hypophysis of 
whales. To-day the school and university 
and social training in England still discount 
all commerce and practical productive 
work, as less worthy of the true gentleman 
than either fighting, sporting, or speculat- 
ing. When the first site for a hospital in 
Labrador was given me by a merchant, he 
embodied in the deed of gift that I was not 
to trade there, for fear of competing with 
his own store. I remember that the proviso 
jarred on me in those days as being almost 
an insult. Since that I have started a long 
series of cash stores, believing them to be 
the most necessary remedy for many of our 
diseases. But it still seems to rub the wrong 
way when I am asked for how much I will 
sell a gallon of molasses. Christ himself 
teaches that the effective use of learning 



CHRIST AND THE INDIVTOUAL 49 

is not purely intellectual. The awakening 
of the soul to the need for an alliance of the 
utilitarian motive with our will is one sure 
stepping-stone to the Christian faith. ''This 
faith can be kept alive/' said Cardinal 
Newman, "only by personal holiness of 
life." It is not irreverent to classify the in- 
tellectual concessions rendered imperative 
by the willingness just to be useful, or by 
the view of life that the object is greater 
than the way in which it is achieved, with 
those greater sacrifices of faith which in- 
duced men to go uncomplaining to physical 
death for others. This is far from saying 
that the end justifies the means. I plead 
only for the adoption of a concession that is 
as ennobling as it is invaluable. 

The great risks and sacrifices that doctors 
have ever been willing to accept — and our 
profession yields to none in the long list 
of willing martyrs to duty, or the advance- 
ment of learning, when the value of the 
object in view has been demonstrated to 
them — is indisputable. It would indeed 



60 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

ill become so humble a member as myself 
to offer any criticism whatever on a pro- 
fession able to claim such a record of heroic 
deeds for the sake of others. I am but ven- 
turing to suggest, because I love it above 
all others, that it too may not yet have 
mounted high enough on the hill of divine 
truth to value to the full the glories of its 
own opportunities. 

I make this statement because I am ab- 
solutely convinced of the value of religious 
faith to the bodies as well as to the souls 
of men, and because the true physician 
must minister to the whole man if he is to 
accomplish his best work. Nor is this de- 
duction founded upon abstract argument, 
but upon concrete proof. Admitting as we 
must that prevention is better than cure, 
my own experience teaches me that the 
Christian faith has succeeded in eliminat- 
ing causes of disease by stimulating people 
to adopt the provisions of preventive 
medicine. It is conceded that the greater 
number of bodily ailments are avoidable 



CHRIST AND THE INDIVmUAL 51 

and due to preventable causes; and that 
the real contagion that produces many 
diseases is evil spiritual influences, such as 
feeble wills, together with evil companion- 
ship and bad environment. It does not 
take special knowledge or apparatus to 
discern this fact. 

Lawyers and clergy, as well as doctors, 
know the endless evils to which alcohol 
leads. True, they may not attribute di- 
rectly to it the subtle sclerosis of liver and 
kidney and brain, the hard artery, the fat 
and generally degenerate body. But they 
see the poverty, starvation, cruelty, ac- 
cidents, and injuries to which it leads. This 
is just as true of the sexual and social vices. 
They see the provisions that society makes 
to pander to them, the red-light districts, 
the ruined girls, the debased men. But 
they do not, as we do, see young wives most 
literally murdered, bhghted and miserable 
children, and the evident results in re- 
ducing vitality, making people incapable 
of withstanding disease or responding to 



52 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

surgical help, or in producing cancer or in- 
sanity. This is no less true in the case of the 
other great enemy of our race, tuberculo- 
sis. 

If the employers of labor were Christian 
men following Christ, labor would receive 
fairer reward, workmen would be better 
housed and able to provide more healthful 
conditions for their families. Cleanliness, 
ventilation, and sanitation would be made 
easy instead of almost impossible. It would 
seem that the physician might well object 
to the ideal Christian conditions. Surely 
Christ-following is my worst enemy, for 
there will be no room for me in a really 
Christian community, when tuberculosis, 
sclerosis, typhoid and social evils are eradi- 
cated. In the City Beautiful of the Christian 
vision it is said there shall be no more sick- 
ness or suffering or death. Unless the call- 
ing of the physician is a mere isolated fac- 
tor, disjointedly cast into a hotch-potch 
of a universe without definite aims and 
views, this must be the ideal he wishes to 



CHRIST AND THE INDIVmUAL 53 

attain. If he does not believe it is ever 
realizable, and yet thinks of it at all, his 
only alternative is insanity. 

The answer is simple. It is this that is the 
glory of our profession, namely, that, work- 
ing in the spirit of the Master, it must 
evolve, its keynote being self-elimination. 
It has cleared the Panama of yellow fever; 
it has banished typhus and plague and 
black death, and almost eradicated small- 
pox, diphtheria, and malaria; it has broken 
the back of cerebro-spinal meningitis and 
sleeping sickness, and many other ills of 
the flesh. The world does acclaim that the 
doctor is the best missionary if only he 
has the vision and follows it. I heard Sir 
Frederic Treves, the famous surgeon, aptly 
say, "Medicine is the best education in the 
world, yet it seems the worst profession to 
follow." Because, while it gives men in- 
finite power, incomparable opportunities, 
when competition from overcrowding of 
the profession arises it leads to such awful 
temptations. A selfish politician, lawyer. 



54 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

clergyman, or merchant has not quite the 
same power over flesh and blood, and does 
not depend so directly upon other people's 
misfortunes for his income. But it was the 
Master's profession, if he had a special one, 
and to me it calls as loudly for men of his 
mind and life, with the true Christ-following 
faith, as ever it did, and as insistently. It 
still calls for men endued with the power 
that comes from on high, as well as with 
an up-to-date knowledge of surgical pro- 
cedure, and fully sympathetic with the 
desire which made Paul say, "I am eager 
to tell the good news, since faith is the 
power by which God brings salvation.'* 

To be more concrete for a moment, I would 
state that the whole stress of the modern 
view of medicine is that fresh air, pure food, 
more hours of rest, better playgrounds, and 
schools and garden villages are a more 
remunerative investment from a medical 
point of view than an enlarged pharma- 
copoeia. The use of drugs seems to be falling 
more and more into unprofessional hands, 



CHRIST AXD THE IXDBTDUAL 55 

and I doubt very much if the unqualified 
chemist and patent-medicine vendor are 
not far the firmest behevers in them. Of 
course there are valuable drugs, and natur- 
ally the physician should know best how 
to handle them. But often enough he gets 
into a routine, and it has been said that 
the average doctor never uses more than a 
dozen different prescriptions, and those no 
longer contain a dozen ingredients each. 
I asked a world-famous surgeon the other 
day what he used if he sprained his own 
ankle. He named a well-known patent 
liniment; for an irritable cut or scratch he 
used a patent ointment; for a digestive 
trouble, a famous patent pill. 

On the other hand, who to-day doubts 
the intimate correlation between health of 
mind and of body, or the mutual inter- 
relation and dependency of both of these 
with the soul, which expresses itself through 
them. Take for instance the nervous in- 
stability that results from the high pres- 
sure of modern life. What an enormous 



66 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

factor it forms in the category of sicknesses. 
The records of every member of our pro- 
fession well confirm the statement that a 
large proportion among our cases consists 
of neurosis, neurasthenia, nervous prostra- 
tion, and so-called functional and idio- 
pathic disorders dependent upon causes 
the nature of which we cannot identify 
under the microscope, but which we think 
are due to brain-cell instability. What a 
long step toward the millennial conditions 
will be covered when these disturbances 
can be banished. 

Once in a clergyman's ^ study before 
morning service I noticed on his table a pile 
of unopened letters quite a foot in height. 
"Why don't you open your letters? '' I 
asked. — "Those all came this morning,'' 
was the reply. — ^'They are all from people 
wanting help or money.?" — "No, mostly 
for nervous disorders and such troubles." — 
"I wish you would give me an example." — 
"Well, here is one. This young man has 

* Dr. Elwood Worcester, Emmanuel Church, Boston. 



CHRIST AND THE INDIVTOUAL 57 

been to no less than three doctors, and 
in one hospital, for subjective stomach 
troubles. They found no cause they could 
remove. We discovered he had a burden on 
his mind, which he could n't get rid of. It 
prevented his sleeping. We found we could 
help him, and he has lost all his pains.'' 

One day while I was attending Dr. Bar- 
ker's clinic at Johns Hopkins, the first pa- 
tient brought into the theatre gave much 
the following history. He had had nose 
trouble, went to a specialist and had his 
adenoids removed; got throat trouble, and 
had his tonsils out; got bladder trouble, 
and had his prostate removed; got an ob- 
scure pain in his abdomen, and had his 
appendix out; had headaches and pain 
in the eyes, went to an eye specialist and 
got glasses. Altogether this was the tenth 
clinic he had experienced. On entering 
the very room in which we sat we had heard 
the sound of the builders of an enormous 
new wing to the hospital, for which millions 
of dollars had been given. Dr. Barker ex- 



58 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

plained to his classes, as soon as the patient 
had gone out, that in all probability this 
new psychiatric hospital might have saved 
this unfortunate gentleman some of his 
organs. It is quite an error to suppose that 
specialization and limitation of a surgeon's 
field always marks the advance of scienti- 
fic treatment. On the contrary, in ancient 
Rome there were specialists on diseases 
of the eyelashes. I presume if they could 
have made a living they would have 
specialized on one eyelash. That a germ, 
a poison, a fee; or an injury, a knife, a clean 
scar, should describe the whole role of the 
doctor, is untenable. 

At the beginning of this lecture I sug- 
gested that prejudice against lay inter- 
ference is as characteristic of our profes- 
sion as of any other. We certainly believe, 
and every now and again state, that there 
is no "hinterland'' containing remedial 
methods of demonstrable value outside our 
own field, though our aslyums for the in- 
sane plainly show us that no one is so in- 



CHRIST AND THE INDrVTDUAL 59 

conceivably certain he is right, and knows 
it all, as the person of unsound mind. It 
is lamentable but true that we have to con- 
fess this, though that is better than that 
we should have to learn that there is some 
value in the statement from outsiders like 
Bernard Shaw. 

Recently the English papers have been 
full of a law^suit against a well-knowTi mani- 
pulator of joints and bones in London. This 
man, though without a professional degree, 
has for years, according to the evidence of 
his numerous patients among the rich and 
educated, been effecting cures of joint 
troubles. A patient with an incurable knee 
trouble who went to him endeavored sub- 
sequently to get money out of him, alleging 
malpractice. The hostility and generally 
unfair attitude of the doctors who were 
called in as witnesses evoked a most con- 
vincing and scathing article in a magazine, 
from one of the most famous of the English 
surgeons, enumerating cases that he had 
himself been unable to relieve and which 



eo THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

had been greatly benefited when he sent 
them to the defendant. He clearly proved 
that the man knew and used methods 
which we ought to adopt as being superior 
to our own. It so happened that one of my 
friends in India whose polo pony fell upon 
him had an exactly similar experience with 
this very bonesetter. While I believe pa- 
tent remedies as a rule are used in inverse 
proportion to the intelligence of the people, 
I claim that humility rather than arro- 
gance is the best attribute of the physician, 
and that more faith in powers outside him- 
self is justifiable and desirable. Osteopathy, 
Eddyism, Dowieism, faith-healing, opto- 
logy, and all extreme swings of the pen- 
dulum of protest, afford evidence of the 
desirability of the larger view for which I 
am pleading. There can be no doubt of the 
physical value of a peaceful mind. Yet 
it almost cost Mesmer his reputation and 
his life when he suggested that mind could 
be made a remedy for bodily ailments. 
Morton, the unfortunate introducer of 



CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 61 

ether, fared even worse. Harvey, the dis- 
coverer of the circulation of the blood, met 
a similar fate. Lister did not escape bitter 
attacks when he discovered antiseptics. 
Whole societies have come into existence 
to discredit the work of men like Jenner, 
Pasteur, and other incomparable benefac- 
tors of our race, while no available means 
are to-day neglected to prevent the oppor- 
tunity of acquiring new truths by experi- 
ments on animals; to minimize the value 
of the results achieved, or even to injure 
the personal reputation of those who are 
humane enough to endure being so greatly 
misunderstood in order to minister to man- 
kind. 

It cost Paul much suflFering and eventu- 
ally death to advocate at Rome faith in 
the Christ as the means of a man's salva- 
tion. The same preaching of the same Gos- 
pel, interpreted in terms of our modern 
view of what Christianity means, its ap- 
plicability to the whole man, has, to my 
knowledge, cost more than one good man 



62 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

almost as bitter an experience of hostility 
in the United States of America; for I 
question if words do not hurt as much as 
stones and whips, in these days when the 
advance of civilization has made us "more 
sensitive to and more capable of suffering." 
The preacher of to-day is saying that not 
only are physical remedies called for, not 
only are mental suggestions needed, but 
that we must ourselves be channels of the 
higher life, through which spiritual streams 
from the Power above us must come forth, 
if we are to contribute our best service 
to our fellow men. In this latter point we 
rejoice that he is beginning to overtake 
George Fox, who preached the same mes- 
sage three hundred years ago. We must 
consciously reach up our trolley arm, that 
contact with the Power above may give us 
an impetus which we cannot have of our- 
selves. 

The value of mental suggestion has been 
greatly impressed upon me by many cases 
in my own experience. The following will 



CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 63 

serve as an example. While the guest of a 
doctor in Montreal I was much interested 
by his experiments in alcoholic cases with 
chloride of gold, which I had always thought 
to be an inert drug. A whole series of cases 
of ordinary alcoholism and of paroxysmal 
dipsomania were successfully treated, many 
of which had defied all former efforts. One 
specially interesting case was that of a 
cook who for over forty years had been a 
chronic rather than a periodic drunkard. 
She was savagely drunk when she came to 
the surgery, and a better impersonation of 
our vague idea of the Devil I have never 
seen. She was immediately injected with 
gold chloride and told she could drink all 
the whiskey she liked, but that soon she 
would n't care for it. She came again next 
day and was admitted to a private ward 
for a few^ days' rest and upbuilding. She 
was again injected and told to go on drink- 
ing the liquor, which was actually poured 
out and put in a glass on the table beside 
her bed. She was also told not to drink it 



64 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

if she did n't like it, since now that she had 
been given the drug the Hquor would make 
her sick. I went in to see her that evening. 
The whiskey on the table was untouched. 
She made a good recovery and returned to 
her occupation. I not only purchased the 
drugs and outfit, and tried them, but sent 
the directions to a well-known London 
physician to try also; but in our hands the 
system failed. Some years later the Mon- 
treal doctor, who was to read a paper on 
the subject before the medical society there, 
wired me to come and testify to the authen- 
ticity of some of his cures, as he feared the 
society was hostile to him. He read his care- 
fully prepared paper, and narrated case 
after case. Afterwards, I gave my con- 
firmatory evidence. The president said, 
and the meeting indorsed the statement, 
that chloride of gold in their hands was 
as useless as water, but none of them for 
one moment doubted that in the hands of 
the author it was perfectly successful. 
Recently Lord Mount Stephen gave a 



CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 65 

large share of his immense wealth away to 
his heirs and friends, that in his life he 
might have the real joy of sharing it with 
others. 

"... For if our virtues 
Did not go forth of us, 't were all alike 
As if we had them not." ^ 

A doctor's joys, no more than his success, 
can be estimated by the size of his fees, or 
what he gets out of his profession, but only 
by what he contributes to it. That "'he 
who will be greatest must be the servant of 
all '' is certainly true of this ministry. This 
is surely what the lawyer and the clergy- 
man and the doctor desire: the conversion 
of the aims and efforts of the mind, the body, 
and the soul. When this is realized, a man 
may say, "I am a living factor in the cre- 
ative purpose, and fidelity in my place is 
the test of the effectiveness of the whole 
design. This unity of the world saves some 
men from the conceit of wisdom, as it saves 
others from the despondency of work." 

^ Measure for Measure, i, i, 34-36. 



66 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

To refer to the value of ministering to 
the whole man and not to connect it with 
the name of Dr. Richard Cabot were im- 
possible. While approaching it from an- 
other point of view, the world is learning 
to look upon him as chief apostle of the need 
for this all-inclusive ministry. 

Myers has said that when it is a ques- 
tion of inquiring into whether mind acts 
on mind without the body, savants can- 
not, and theologians will not, accept evi- 
dence. But while there may be much truth 
in satirizing many preachers as Stigginses, 
I am convinced that it is not the whole 
truth, any more than that there is no truth 
in the subliminal self. 

To turn now to the second division of 
our lecture, the profession of the law. I 
almost fear to tread on that ground. Though 
acting as a magistrate for over ten years, 
I am obliged to confess that I have been 
unhampered by any special knowledge of 
the technicalities of the profession, and 
as a medical exponent I have naturally 



CHRIST AND THE INDIVmUAL 67 

had a remedial and not a retributive 
bias. 

Surely, the true lawyer's ideal is not a 
crime, a retribution, a fee, though he too 
is tempted to keep so close to the mill which 
grinds out dollars that he may lose the full 
vision of his potentiality. Christ as a law- 
yer would, exactly as if a doctor, be work- 
ing for big and worthy ends, — to produce 
conditions that would abolish crime, — and 
so unselfishly working for the elimination 
of his own profession. To me it seems just 
as certain that if the true physician must 
treat the whole man, if he is to cure phys- 
ical ailments, so moral obliquities demand 
the same treatment of the true lawyer. That 
disease leads to sin and crime is quite as 
true as that sin and crime lead to disease. 
A man in the full flush of health and in good 
surroundings is less likely to become a 
criminal than a weakling in a bad environ- 
ment. 

One of our first pieces of work among the 
fishermen was to oust the floating grogshops 



68 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

from the iBshing fleet, by supplying vessels 
in their midst which made provision for all 
their legitimate demands: such as cheap 
tobacco, social opportunities, and simple 
religious teaching, but not alcoholic liquors. 
This policy so commended itself to the 
magistrates of the fishing seaports, that 
we hold their written and unasked testi- 
monials to the lessening of crime and even 
the reduction of police forces in the fisher- 
men's quarters, and the diminution of 
poverty and the need of poor-relief. Event- 
ually the results seemed so desirable to 
conservative governments bordering the 
German Ocean that they agreed to an in- 
ternational convention. It favored and 
enforced the most severe laws against sell- 
ing any liquors on the high seas, on the sole 
ground that if their environment was im- 
proved, the lives of the people would also 
be improved, a deduction fully indorsed by 
the results founded on the experimental, 
the best of all bases. The same principle 
obtained on the shore when we supplied 



CHRIST AND THE INDIVmUAL 69 

institutes belonging to the fishermen, and 
had laws passed to prevent wages being 
paid in saloons or annexes thereto. The 
same results accrued in Labrador and North 
Newfoundland when the sale of liquor was 
prohibited in a region where such a law 
could be enforced. The aged mayor of 
Portland, Maine, near the close of a most 
successful business career, told me that 
though the liquor traflac, almost all-power- 
ful, had done its best to make the prohib- 
ition laws ineffective, and to falsify their 
results, crime had unquestionably been 
lessened. 

The absence of the environment of the 
open saloon and flaunting windows, and 
the nameless crimes connected with that 
traffic, are alike dependent largely on the 
prevention of the sale of intoxicants. The 
celebrated Judge Altgeld, when governor 
of Illinois, stated pithily that ninety-five 
per cent of crimes of violence and burglary 
were due to the same cause (alcohol). To 
my mind part of the privilege of the life- 



70 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

work of the Christian lawyer is to help to 
improve the environment of the tempted 
classes. To see justice impartially admin- 
istered is of course his supreme special 
function; and there again he has the same 
opportunities as the doctor for the real joys 
of personal service to the oppressed, and for 
righting the wrongs of the injured. But 
would any worthy member of the bar con- 
tend that therewith ended the function of 
the true lawyer; that to exact retribution, 
to deter evildoers by threats, or even to 
get justice for those in trouble, made a 
great lawyer? Such a course might make 
him a rich lawyer, a popular lawyer, but 
would not make him great. To render 
crime unattractive, to implant new as- 
pirations, to regenerate the individual, and 
to make laws remedial, are surely truer 
claims to immortaHty. 

The laws have been framed by the pow- 
erful of a generation gone, and naturally 
leave us a heritage that demands remodel- 
ing if it is to meet the needs of a new era. 



CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 71 

Why should men hesitate to apply the 
same test to the dogmas of the churches, 
which are the outgrowths of despotism, 
and not applicable to a true democracy as 
are its teachings? A real human sympathy 
with the life of to-day shows that there 
is infinite opportunity for simplifying the 
processes of the law, if it is to express our 
views of Christ's ideal of brotherhood, or 
even to give the poor man a chance of get- 
ting justice or to make the rich man fear 
punishment. 

While working eight years in the purlieus 
of Whitechapel, I learned beyond all ques- 
tion, first, that often all the punishments 
invented by the law and all the provisions 
made for the protection of life and pro- 
perty failed in many cases; and further, I 
saw, as I have seen since that time, that 
the very men whom the punishments only 
made worse were perfectly capable of re- 
formation. Intelligent sympathy and prac- 
tical love cure individuals who have been 
pronounced incurable — the very methods 



72 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

the Master advocated and calls for still. 
Among such translations of love is the 
administration of the new kind of prisons, 
such as that of the Massachusetts Reform- 
atory. Here men are not punished again 
and again in prison for little or big breaches 
of discipline, but are simply helped not 
to fail by offering them temptations to 
be good and by rewards for success in the 
attempt. Thus, instead of insane isolation 
and brutalization, making men revengeful 
and despairing, interesting and remunera- 
tive industries are taught and work is de- 
manded, — good solid work, a temptation 
many criminals never get outside, and a 
gain, as they never had a chance to learn 
any craft before. More important still, 
good work is immediately made remunera- 
tive. Decorations, such as good conduct 
stripes, are displayed on the uniforms, and 
each new one means a shortened sentence. 
Responsibility and trust are gradually 
given them, and self-respect, hope, and 
aspiration induced and encouraged; pride 



CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 73 

and even esprit de corps are cultivated, — 
though as yet there are no inter-reforma- 
tory athletic contests, so far as I know! 

There are plenty of people, however, 
who still maintain "once a criminal, al- 
ways a criminal/' There are many ever 
ready to condemn to the pathologically in- 
curable class, those who often enough are 
only the victims of circumstance. The Mas- 
ter never was among these critics. He 
was ever the world's apostle of optimism 
and of hope. The amazing records of this 
Reformatory show that seventy-five per 
cent of these poor fellows are cured; of the 
remainder, fifteen per cent being physical 
degenerates. I say poor fellows, for my 
view is that they are to be pitied, if only 
because of the hell on earth which they 
make for themselves, and the loss of ca- 
pacity and the vision of what God intended 
them to be. But unless we have a vision 
ourselves of the true greatness of our op- 
portunity, we can hardly expect to sympa- 
thize with them for their blindness. 



74 THE AD\T:XTURE OF LIFE 

It is not the intellectual faculties to 
which Christianity seeks to supply new 
injormation^ but it is the heart that it is 
necessary to reach. The Master always 
taught that the renewal and perfecting of 
a man was dependent upon a new heart, and 
no one has improved on that treatment that 
I know of. The efforts of the conventional, 
perfunctory religious teacher, Hke those of 
the sloppy and shallow pietist, remind me 
strongly of such drugs as tartarated anti- 
mony. If rightly given, the desired result 
is obtained, but if wrongly, it is promptly 
rejected. It is not religiosity or intellec- 
tualism, but love, that is needed. I claim 
that the great lawj^er will be as eager as 
any specialist in talking, to translate Tsasely, 
into permanent effective methods for re- 
clamation, the true religion, namely, the 
love that saves. 

Dr. Richard Cabot and others in medi- 
cine. Dr. Elwood Worcester and other 
clerg}% have accepted and eloquently 
taught by example and precept the neces- 



CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 75 

sity and the privilege in their two profes- 
sions of considering causally and remedially 
the family and the immediate home sur- 
roundings of those they are endeavoring 
to help. Of course a great deal of a law- 
yer's work does not permit any such oppor- 
tunity, yet I feel that the Master himself 
as a lawyer to-day would find chances to 
exercise the same spirit. ^Etiology and 
pathology, sociology and theology, have 
found a parallel in the study of criminology 
which is evidence of the opening of fresh 
and glorious channels for life energies in 
the sister profession of the law. So young 
is it, however, that the Italian Lombroso, 
who is considered the parent of it, is still 
living in Italy. Germany has developed 
the study, and Professor Wigmore of 
Chicago is responsible for a society and a 
journal of criminology of Illinois. 

In the amusing comic opera, the ''Mi- 
kado,'' a verse of song runs: — 

**My object all sublime 
I shall achieve in time. 



76 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

To make the punishment fit the crime. 
The punishment fit the crime." 

Yet what an ideal service, what a real suc- 
cess and joy the universal accomplishment 
or even serious effort toward its fulfillment 
would be, working in the Master's spirit 
of love for the man and hatred for the sin. 
That would imply that success in the effort 
spelled new men out of old, though science 
and evolution call the criminals hopeless. 
The real object of the lawyer's life can 
be attained only by offering his quota, 
infinitesimal though it be; but he can 
contribute it by reincarnating the spirit 
of the Master. 

I would inquire here in what possible 
way the achievement of this glorious and 
ultimate end can be materially influenced 
by the la\\yer's mere mental apprehension 
of or submission to subtle theologic dogmas 
or refinements in the precise method of ex- 
pressing his devotion to God. What con- 
nection have such things, "per se, with real 
religion? They may help his religion, but 



CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 77 

they are not it. Plain, common courage 
has much more influence than intellectual 
attitude. Heney, who in the face of almost 
every pessimist on earth, in the face of ap- 
palling difficulties and opposition, in the 
face of persecution and attempted murder, 
sent the great civic burglars in San Fran- 
cisco to jail, preached a gospel in the true 
spirit of the Christ. For a poor Carpenter 
to stand alone before the powers that be, 
knowing that no protection was afforded 
life by the law of his day, and say publicly, 
"You generation of vipers! How can you 
escape the damnation of hell?" required 
courage, not theology. The cross of Christ 
calls for intelligent courage and not intellec- 
tual eflFacement and mere ability to swal- 
low. When Heney went back after scarcely 
recovering from his wounds, and faced the 
court, and again, after tw^o mistrials, com- 
menced a third, he, a volunteer, unpaid 
in dollars, fighting almost as a lone man 
against the immeasurable burden of hatred 
and opposition, to me presented at least 



78 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

one aspect of the truly great Christian 
lawyer. 

What is a corporation lawyer to do, you 
say, when possibly his very living depends 
upon his winning a technicality for the 
bosses against equity for the community. 
Abraham Lincoln would not take cases 
when he knew his side was in the wrong, 
and that winning meant doing a wrong. 
To connive at the defeat of justice is to 
prostitute a holy duty. That's all; you 
must be brave if you are to have courage. 
You must take adverse chances if you are 
to be a hero. It is simply a question of 
what you seek in life. The purely imper- 
sonal position of the lawyer of course is the 
easiest path, exactly as it is for the doctor 
who asks, as Cabot says, ''What is in the 
waiting-room.? Anything of inter est.^^" I 
acknowledge that to sympathize with each 
case is diflBcult; it makes a claim on a law- 
yer which must curtail his practice. But he 
is doing what he would like done for him 
were he the client. And I am contending 



CHRIST AND THE INDIVIDUAL 79 

that it is possible, and constitutes the true 
scale by which to measure greatness, and 
is what the Master would give, and what 
faith in him calls for. 

Although owing to lack of time I have 
been unable to touch upon the three types 
of mind into which it would appear one 
might divide men, — the scientific, the lit- 
erary, and the practical, — still I maintain 
that one principle applies to all. ''But Jesus 
does not classify people. He gathers up the 
different types of human life into one com- 
prehensive unity of discipleship." ^ In 
discussing the doctor and the lawyer I be- 
lieve that I have in substance demonstrated 
the working-out of the Christian ideal, 
whatever the category into which a man 
may fall. ''There is no activity of man 
which may not be the door, and into which 
and through which cannot enter that power 
of God which makes the man indeed to be 
God's servant.'' ^ 

^ Paradise, The Church and the Individual. 
* Phillips Brooks. 



LECTURE III 

CHRIST AND SOCIETY 

"Granted the reality of religion, what is 
its contribution to modern life?'' I have 
already warned you that my idea in these 
lectures is to defend the rationality and 
value of faith in Christ on the basis of my 
own physical, mental, and spiritual experi- 
ences. I do not pretend that I possess 
scientific acquaintance with our peculiar 
social conditions, nor do I claim to have 
any special expert knowledge of the most 
successful ways of improving them. The 
world is just learning that the first can only 
be gained by the same patient study we 
devote to medicine or law; the second, I 
am certain, only by a life of personal de- 
votion. 

It is necessary to do, not merely to talk, 
if we are to know the truth about the reme- 
dies for life's troubles and difficulties. Still, 



CHRIST AND SOCIETY 81 

with Browning, I realize that "God must 
be gained by first leap/' and the object of 
this lecture is not to show that by any 
intellectual process man by searching can 
demonstrate God, but only that, with the 
advance of civilization, there is not a less 
but an ever-increasing need for what real 
religion has to contribute. There is proof 
enough of this on every hand for the man 
who is willing to experiment, to justify to 
his own mind his taking that leap, for 
society's benefit if not for his own. 

One thing more is necessary to be made 
clear before going further, and that is, 
what do we mean by religion? By religion, 
in this lecture, I mean that following of the 
Christ which is a daily endeavor to inter- 
pret his teachings by translating them into 
action; or, in other words, trying to do what 
he would do if he were in our circumstances. 
If you were a housemaid, that would re- 
quire you, in the words of the Salvation 
Army hymn, ''to dust the shelf behind 
the door''; or if you were a king, ''just to 



82 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

king well/' as one of your own humorists 
suggests. 

Jesus was peculiar among religious teach- 
ers in being "'no mere speculative philo- 
sopher/' no pure scientist for science' 
sake. He was not of the type of Holmes's 
Scarabee. I always think of him as the 
family physician of the human race. Re- 
ligion to him existed for the purpose of 
action; it was valuable solely for the serv- 
ice of mankind. In the very simplest 
language he tells us, not what God would 
have us think, but what God would have 
us do; putting within the reach of our daily 
life that which not only spells our redemp- 
tion here and now, but also enables us 
to be redeemers ourselves, and so allows 
us to contribute that which is lasting to 
modern life. Was it not exactly in this 
faith that these lectures were founded .'^ 

Yet religion in the past has spent far 
more time and energy, and endured far 
more suffering and sacrifice and defeat, in 
endeavoring to perpetuate crystallized Intel- 



CHRIST AND SOCIETY 83 

lectual attitudes and man-advised organ- 
izations, all calling themselves "churches," 
than in trying to reincarnate the life of the 
Master in their own. 

A few years ago the visible churches 
awoke to the fact that they were fast be- 
coming what is known as "back numbers "; 
and that the profession of the minister of 
religion was in danger of being side-tracked. 
They are awake now, however, and on 
all sides they are offering an increasingly 
valuable quota to modern civilization. 
"Churches'' to me comprise all those reli- 
gious institutions which, through helping 
forward the reign of peace, mercy, and 
reverence, induce righteousness, joy, and 
peace, which is the Kingdom of God. Christ 
himself says that their labels do not count 
for anything. The way we salute our gen- 
eral is of much less importance than the 
way we obey him. Victory is more momen- 
tous than tactics. "Christian men,'' to 
the Master, were those who were on his 
side, and every such institution, whether 



84 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

Protestant or Catholic, Jewish or purely 
ethicalj^is directly enriching our life to- 
day. Nor is 'Hhe state merely a local as- 
sociation existing to prevent mutual injury 
and promote universal exchange. . . . The 
object of the political association is not 
merely a common life, but noble action," 
says Aristotle.^ 

The churches are awaking to the fact that 
the state can and must be "religious"; and 
that just in proportion as an institution 
has no creed, its religion can be universal. 
Christ himself propounded no creed, and 
all the churches can unite on those lines 
which call for no special creed, but merely 
for the recognition of man's brotherhood, 
which each and every church acknowledges. 
In this way we see the great hope of their 
future in the federation of churches which 
is everywhere growing up, and which is 
striving to unite all their efforts for the 
betterment of social conditions. 

Let us take now, as instances, some of the 
* Dr. Lyman Abbott, Yale Lectures, 



CHRIST AND SOCIETY 86 

outgrowths of the churches. I myself have 
seen enough of the Young Men's Christian 
Association and Young Women's Christian 
dissociation to know that, with their 
splendid buildings and intelligent work, 
they are materially adding to the comfort 
and upHft of Hfe of tens of thousands, nay, 
of thousands of thousands, not only in this 
country, but the whole world round. They 
have even tried to make war comfortable. 
Apparently it narrows the limits of agencies 
to have to give examples and to name any 
particular helpful factors; but a doctor is 
impelled to illustrate his principles by 
quoting cases. Thus, again, who that 
knows anything of Robert College and its 
work, which helped so much to give free- 
dom to Turkey; of the Beyrout College 
and its magnificent work for Syria and for 
the Mohammedan world generally; of the 
colleges in India which have shown that, 
given a chance, the downtrodden classes 
can successfully compete with the highest 
castes; of the huge hospitals in China, Ja- 



86 THE AD\TXTL11E OF LIFE 

pan, India, and the Islands of the Sea, — 
but knows perfectly well the truth that the 
churches are contributing liberally. To the 
nations everj^where Christianity is teach- 
ing the real value of human hfe, and so, 
especially in the East, is raising the whole 
aspiration of the people by making them 
understand what they may become. This 
is so much the case that in Japan the 
wisest scholars have declared that only 
in Christianity can they see an adequate 
basis for indi^nidual and national hfe. They 
make this statement in spite of the facts 
of the hquor and opium traffic carried on by 
Christian nations; in spite of anti-Christian 
travelers, bad officials, the selfishness of 
so-called governments, and the faUibihty 
of missionaries and their methods. 

To-day there is so much prejudice against 
the title ''missionary" that many people, 
apparently, prefer to consider their lives 
purposeless rather than to admit that 
''mission" is only a sjTiomTQ for ''life." 
We must remember that there are many 



CHRIST AND SOCIETY 87 

failures in American social life, and yet 
here also are many lives which are effect- 
ive contributions to the world's economy. 
I do not wish to w^eary you with examples, 
but my interests being among sailors I 
might here testify to the value of such 
splendid institutes as that of your Ameri- 
can Seaman's Society, recently erected in 
New York; to the similarly efficient but less 
expensive plants here in Boston, and to in- 
stitutions of the same kind scattered all 
round the world. These all give men who 
are away from their homes a warm welcome, 
a place to rest and play, a good cheap lodg- 
ing, and a safeguard from the land-shark 
and the crimp. Through all of these relig- 
ion is making a serious Christian effort 
towards the solution of a problem which 
menaces the domestic life of those whose 
life-service to the community necessarily 
deprives them of the natural protection 
and help of their own homes. To me this 
is simply paying a debt to those to whom 
the cost of catching our fish and transport- 



88 THE AD\TXTURE OF LIFE 

ing our merchandise is often only to be 
reckoned in ''lives of men." It is still the 
privilege of religion to see that this debt is 
paid. If she fails to do so, some day it will 
be recognized by the men themselves as 
their right, and their o\mi miions will pro- 
vide it, once more taking from the church 
a chance to justify herself. Nay, more, this 
will anyhow be just as surely the case, if 
into the church's interpretation of relig- 
ion she introduces the sense of patronage 
and intellectual superiority which have 
characterized her too much in the past, and 
which so ill become her as a servant of the 
Master. 

There are more instances than one of 
big plants of this kind, just suited for prac- 
tical messages of love, being totally unsuc- 
cessful because their flavor is spoiled by a 
sense of the ''holier-than-thou" arrogance. 
It is this fact that makes men say that these 
efforts do little more than touch the real 
problem. Believe me, it is sadly enough 
that the working man passes the building 



CHRIST AND SOCIETY 89 

which promises exactly what he needs. If 
he does not enter, it is because he feels that 
the building is not really his. Per contray 
an eminently successful eflFort of this kind 
to meet the needs of the working men is 
Hollywood Inn at Yonkers, New York. It 
was created by an Episcopal clergyman/ 
but is owned and run by the men them- 
selves. They and their unions all find a home 
there, as do their clubs, their societies, and 
their friends. It is theirs. There they play 
what games they like. It just stands for 
clean games without gambling, and for 
drinks without alcohol. No public worship 
or preaching is considered necessary. It 
is just a demonstration of love, not a verbal 
message. As a result of it, Mr. Freeman's 
church found a thousand new commun- 
icant members, because he preached the 
undeniable Gospel. 

Ten thousand other practical agencies 
are ever more and more trying to do things 

^ Rev. James Freeman, now of St. Mark's Church, 
Minneapolis. 



90 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

in Christ's spirit, and these are forcing the 
world to acknowledge the contribution to 
life which religion can make. The increas- 
ing number of thoughtful men pouring 
out of our colleges, anxious to give life 
and intellect and money to the service of 
the world, is itself an offering which no 
man can estimate — though any fool can 
sneer at it. The growing passion for serv- 
ice has helped as many to work at home 
as it has sent out for that purpose to for- 
eign fields. 

To all intents and purposes, the old idea of 
the church is dying, if not dead. Thank 
God if it is. I could say with a whole heart, 
"The Church is dead! Long live the 
Church!" 

But while it is good to review what the 
churches have accomplished, and to be 
able to derive from that courage and zeal 
for more service, the fact that there has 
been some success must be used only to 
prove to us that we can, and therefore 
musty do more. It is from the lips and pens 



CHRIST AND SOCIETY 91 

of acknowledged leaders of many churches, 
and from those who have given the most 
earnest thought to the subject, that we learn 
that, so far as some of the most vital is- 
sues of modern life are concerned, the visible 
churches at the present time are practically 
a side issue. Most assuredly their future 
existence depends upon the attitude which 
they now adopt. Other agencies outside 
all the communions will, if they fall short, 
take out of their hands the only functions 
which they can find to occupy their ener- 
gies. 

Thus, for example, at one time the church 
aflForded all the educational advantages. 
At the bar of public opinion she was found 
guilty of prostituting that sacred office for 
purely party purposes, and so she has 
forfeited her right to the performance of 
that most vital function. 

Social settlement workers, civic leagues, 
rightly administered labor unions are ad- 
vancing ends which righteousness demands, 
and which the churches have considered 



92 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

"outside their province." As if they could 
aflford to be silent, or sit on the fence, when 
any question affecting the vital issues of 
life was concerned. Only the other day 
here in Boston, in a book shop, I overheard 
two clergymen talking of the efforts made 
by the charity organization in their town 
to cope with the ''social evil." They had 
evidently been asked to cooperate, and one 
minister was explaining his refusal to the 
other by the remark, ''But of course that 
sort of thing is quite outside the church's 
domain." 

The man who is going to advance the 
Kingdom of God in the world in any way 
must be in the world enough to understand 
it. A clergyman whom I know always 
dresses in a light business suit and inva- 
riably lunches at a down-town club, that 
he may mix with other men, as the Galilean 
Carpenter did, and so may know the real 
minds and interests of those he is trying to 
help. Only by understanding a patient's 
needs can any physician hope for success. 




CHRIST AND SOCIETY 93 

It is no use merely shouting, "'Down with 
rich corporations/' however bad they may 
be, unless we are prepared to find substi- 
tutes for them. Christ's religion especially 
is bound to be constructive. There is a 
danger of the shallow man shouting that 
his voice may be heard, just as there is 
that the scholar may be led into thinking 
too much. The proof of this is not difficult 
to discover. We have only to go and see 
why it is that some preachers face empty 
pews while other churches are packed with 
men. 

The people in these days gauge things 
by their practical value; and men go to the 
church only if it has something to give 
them. They will go to " divine service'' 
only if they find it inspires them to express 
better their own devotion in human serv- 
ice. This fact has further been exemplified 
among our own fishermen by a fishermen's 
union which started twelve months ago, 
and now has seventeen thousand members. 
In another twelve months it promises to 



94 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

include the whole number of the most 
virile among them, because it has already 
helped them to get a fairer return for their 
labor, and to make their own voices heard 
in matters which concern their direct home 
and personal interests. 

In our country the church buildings are 
more ornate and comfortable than ever, — 
better auditoriums, better heated, aired, 
and seated. The clergy are adding lantern 
lectures, social gatherings, and all the latest 
attractions copied from the churches here. 
But in spite of all this the pews are actually 
not one whit more crowded than when I 
went there twenty years ago. 

The fact is that as yet church members 
have not realized the acuteness of the social 
problem. In Labrador this is excusable. 
There we are still living in a period of a 
hundred years ago. Our laboring classes 
have not yet acquired the advantages of 
education. They have only just begun to 
discover that if the workers go hungry and 
naked, while the thinkers live in super- 



CHRIST AND SOCIETY 95 

fluous luxury, there must be something 
wrong. Nor do they yet live near enough 
to the offensive selfishness of the idle rich to 
contrast their condition with the poor op- 
portunity and wretched lot in life which is 
the best they can expect their own unceas- 
ing toil to afford. A large proportion of the 
aged and physically incapacitated workers 
still expect at the end of life to have to 
look to charity for the merest means of sub- 
sistence. The labor unions have already 
improved conditions, and the working 
classes are beginning to see that many 
things are not right; and that customs pre- 
vail which the men following Christ should 
never have countenanced. 

Similarly, your own newspapers almost 
daily expose some abuse of the control of 
public utilities which is putting absolutely 
unfair remuneration into the hands of 
grafters. These offenses are beginning to 
grate badly on the sensibilities of the worth- 
while citizen. 

The same is true, again, of the injuries 



96 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

inflicted upon communities by the hold- 
ing-up of large tracts of land, and the 
consequent absorption of the unearned 
increment, by those who do absolutely no- 
thing either to produce or to deserve it; who 
only cramp and crowd unmercifully those 
whose labor makes the value. The making 
of outrageous piles of money from the pro- 
moting of companies, by those who have no 
intention of carrying on the enterprises, is 
all wrong. While in London, it was largely 
advertised that I was to lecture under the 
title, ''Midst Ice and Snow in Labrador.'' 
It so happened that quite a number of 
speculators had recently taken grants for 
timber areas in our country. Representa- 
tives from more than one such company 
offered me remuneration if I would consent 
to have my name used in connection with 
the scheme. The value of their proposi- 
tion to the public was more than doubtful. 
One at least, which was the most insistent. 
was to my mind perfectly unsound as an 
investment, and I knew that no proper 



CHRIST AND SOCIETY 97 

precautions had been taken to insure the 
interests of the investors. It was simply 
a scheme of rogues for swindling the public 
and then reaping the benefits. The repre- 
sentatives were evidently shaking in their 
shoes as to what I was going to say of the 
country in my lecture, for they told me 
that my very title would make it difficult 
for them to sell the shares which they had 
underwritten. 

Every method of accumulating wealth 
without working for it, or of reaping greater 
returns than the work done justifies, is be- 
ginning to arouse the ire of the great masses 
of the people. Whether they can find the 
remedy is open to question, but there is 
no doubt they are starting to look for it. 
Thank God, so are some of the churches. 
The church is bound by its philosophy to 
believe that it has a contribution for this 
as well as every other social trouble, and 
that there is a remedy, and that it is the 
church's business to find it. 

The other day I came to get a few days' 



98 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

rest at one of your large hotels, directly 
from Labrador, where a man has to work 
for every cent he earns. Far the most 
marvelous room in the immense luxurious 
pile was a small one in the basement, with 
a blackboard all over one side of the wall, 
on which were endless chalk iSgures. The 
manager, who was showing me around, 
said, "I saw one of the guests make six 
thousand dollars in that room last summer 
in the course of one morning. He gave a 
thousand of it to another man, and he lost 
it in an hour or two. It is really a kind 
of gambling-hell. They call it the Stock 
Exchange!" 

A couple of years ago I was in the Casino 
at Monte Carlo, watching the roulette 
players. It amused me to see their antics 
for an hour or so. Yet most of them were 
playing for only paltry twenty-franc bills. 

All that I am contending is that such 
indecent display of luxury, and all these 
other things cannot be right. I am not sug- 
gesting a remedy. But I am certain that 



CHRIST AND SOCIETY 99 

true religion offers one, and offers the only 
one. 

With us in Labrador there are so few 
clergy, and so hard is it to get the chance 
to be married, that it is not an uncommon 
part of my duties as a surgeon and a mag- 
istrate to have to tie the wedding knot. 
But with us, when it is tied, it is tied, and 
it is never unloosed. Our law allows no di- 
vorce. We have to come to the United 
States and reside six months to obtain that. 
Bishop Potter, Shailer Mathews, Peabody, 
and others among our foremost modern 
thinkers on these matters are unanimous 
that the relation between husband and 
wife is second only to that between God 
and man — is the most sacred human re- 
lation. We all know what Christ said, — 
^'that a man should forsake all others, and 
cleave to his wife.'' 

In France the proportion of divorces is 
enormous, and the death rate more than 
ever in excess of the birth rate. But right 
here in America, even taking into account 



100 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

the increase of population, the proportion 
of divorce in thirty years has increased over 
one hundred per cent. It is interesting to 
note that in times of commercial depres- 
sion the decrease in income has apparently 
knit the family closer together, and the 
number of divorces has dropped. It is also 
interesting to note that the proportion of 
divorces in the Western States is many 
times larger than in the Eastern. 

Here again, in our modern life something 
is wrong. It seems right to me that at last, 
those who are being heard most forcibly in 
this matter, are members of the churches. 
But religion has not yet made itself felt as it 
might have done, and ought to have done, 
on so vital a question. Many of us are too 
busy with our own little dogmas or ritual 
or polities, and our own special doctrines, 
to attend to any of these things. We are 
so afraid that the saving faith which has 
outlived nineteen centuries without us 
needs us now to keep it in the old crystal- 
lized form in which it was when every 



CHRIST AND SOCIETY 101 

single aspect of the life it came to save was 
different. We consider it far more import- 
ant for us to see that the remedy is ad- 
ministered in exactly the same shape as it 
was then, than that the active principle 
should be clothed and adapted to the idio- 
syncrasies, needs, and capacities for assim- 
ilation of the patients of to-day. If the 
church stands still, and everything else 
goes on, it seems quite probable that event- 
ually she will be left behind. Calomel is 
the same drug as ever, and is still adminis- 
tered, but not as it was twenty-five years 
ago. Even if they are only new forms of 
old diseases, the treatment of the same old 
typhoid and the same old heart troubles is 
quite different nowadays. 

Again, I am certain that no form of 
government can ever remedy these evils, 
so long as men's hearts are selfish. There 
seems little to-day to encourage reformers 
to hand over money and business respon- 
sibilities and control to modern legislatures, 
whether civic, state, or federal. Judging 



102 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

by the report in the Book of Exodus, mat- 
ters don't seem to have improved much 
since Moses' day. He was able to find one 
man out of every ten who hated covetous- 
ness, but he had promptly to appoint such 
persons to look after the other nine. 

"America, to be saved from barbarism,'' 
says Dr. Abbott, "must be safeguarded by 
force from without, which is despotism, or 
by force from within, which is religion." 
He also quotes De Tocqueville, who says: 
*' Religion is much more necessary in the 
republic which they [atheistic republicans] 
set forth in glowing colors than in the 
monarchy which they attack. It is more 
needed in democratic republics than in any 
others. How is it possible that society 
should escape destruction if the moral tie 
be not strengthened in proportion as the 
political tie is relaxed .^^ And what can be 
done with a people who are their own mas- 
ters, if they be not submissive to the 
Deity.?" 1 

^ Dr. Lyman Abbott, Yale Lectures. 



CHRIST AND SOCIETY 103 

But it is no religion of scribe and Phari- 
see that is needed. It is said of a certain 
rajah that he kept as a pet a Httle white- 
haired pig. Nothing would cure it of wal- 
lowing in every mud pool it came to, till 
one of the ruler's wisest counsellors suc- 
ceeded in removing its heart and substi- 
tuting that of a young lamb. Education 
cannot give this new heart any more than 
political institutions can. 

The world needs religion more than ever 
it did, but a religion that concerns every 
feature and phase of life. To be perfectly 
effective, it must separately inspire every 
individual with the spirit of unselfish love. 
For society is only an aggregate of individ- 
uals. That was distinctly the teaching of 
the Master, and his method of achieving 
his end. 

It is as important in small matters as 
in large. Take the hundred and one other 
get-rich-quick methods, commercial shams 
and swindles. Reference to such trifles as 
the use of patent drugs and fraudulent 



104 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

cure-alls imposed upon a gullible public 
might, it seems, be almost out of place in 
a discussion of this kind. But I have seen 
how the sale of these is almost in inverse 
proportion to the intelligence of the vic- 
tims, which means so often in proportion 
to their ability to lose their money. If one 
of us loses a hundred dollars in a bucket- 
shop swindle, he can afford to laugh at the 
cleverness of the trick. But I have seen 
the bread-winner of a hungry and naked 
family stinting his children in proper food 
that he might send twenty dollars for an 
electric belt which was n't even a belt — 
much less electric. It is the privilege of 
those who know (i.e., of religion) to save 
those of their brethren who can't and don't 
know for themselves, from all unright- 
eous imposition. 

Perhaps this is more easily recognized 
when the question is one of foods. The pure- 
food acts are, apparently, just the very 
kind of exceedingly mundane regulations 
which most men would disassociate from 



CHRIST AND SOCIETY 105 

religion. I believe they save as much suffer- 
ing as many of the discoveries of medicine 
cure after the trouble has been caused. 
Those who enforce these acts certainly do 
Christian work. 

The so-called social question is another 
matter of immense general importance. 
The veil which is drawn over it is a very 
thin one, and the existence of red-light 
districts is alone a blot on our social life. 
No doubt there is good in most of us, but 
alas, we have no imagination. If only the 
awful pathos of the intolerable burden of 
misery and shame which this spells were 
realized, the innate chivalry of manhood 
would rise in loathing against that which 
now it even dares to wink at. If men could 
see as I, a physician, have been forced to 
see, some of the last piteous scenes in the 
drama of these lost lives, they would realize 
that hell existed right alongside them, and 
that they were as surely creating it as the 
sentry who sleeps at his post causes de- 
struction and death in his own household. 



106 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

Just think of a brute who would condemn 
his own sister and daughter to such a fate. 
Then consider the creature who would spare 
his own, but damn the defenseless of others. 
Then imagine this creature posing as a 
man; nay, even daring to assume the title 
"Christian," attending public worship and 
arguing as to the intellectual method of 
salvation. Wrapped in her country's flag 
I buried on a rocky headland of our lonely 
coast just such a broken life — a tender 
girl of eighteen years, dead only because 
she dare not see her own home again. Has 
religion nothing to offer.? Is there no rem- 
edy.? If I thought so I would here and now 
in these lectiu'es brand the pretenses of the 
Christ as false. It is because he has shown 
us the remedy and put it right into our 
hands, for this and every other social 
trouble, that I stand here to-day. Neither a 
Solon nor a Solomon can invent laws which 
will prevent this evil. Only Christ has 
taught us the cure for this canker of civil- 
ization — a cure which we all can use. It is 



CHRIST AND SOCIETY 107 

only by passing many laws against others, 
but one law against ourselves, and then 
seeing to it that it is carried out. You can- 
not make children good by punishing them; 
truly loving them is the only way; the love 
shown by the Master himself being our ex- 
ample. The fact is, the less you say ''don't," 
the nearer you get to Christ's teaching. 
The 'Hhou shalt nots'' were all said by 
Moses. The religion of my youth was, 
practically, though not quite in the sense 
in which Harvard uses the word, ''Thou 
shalt not — or the Gridiron!'' That is 
no way to induce righteousness. It merely 
fixes in the mind a desire for the forbidden 
things. This is pathetically shown when for 
any reason the will control is suspended — 
for instance, by the language a most un- 
likely person may use when under an 
anaesthetic, or in a period of temporary in- 
sanity. 

The Master teaches that a negative, a 
void, is our greatest danger, and that our 
supreme source of strength is first to love 



108 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

some one else. He says, ^'Thou shall love/* 
Experience teaches that to love him is the 
real remedy. I have been asked why some 
men, to use your expressive slang, *^go 
to the devir' young, and why some others, 
after an apparently innocuous life, follow 
the same road after middle life. Experi- 
ence again suggests that there is, as it were, 
an opsonic index of character as well as in 
physical things — and a personal and 
possibly a physical nervous equation of 
resistance. Both speak to me of the need 
of some other positive source of strength 
outside ourselves, to supply our lack. 

The drink question is another modern 
problem of exactly the same kind. I don't 
know where to begin to bring this subject 
from the abstract to the concrete. One can 
begin anywhere. Its tragedies are familiar 
to all of us. They are positively common- 
place. We were fighting in the city in 
which I lived for the closing of saloons on 
Sunday. Half an hour before the meeting 
I was called to see a distracted mother 




CHRIST AND SOCIETY 109 

whose only boy, a splendid young fisher 
lad, had just fallen drunk over the quay- 
side and lost his life. The scene of the 
accident was within easy stone's throw of 
the platform of the town hall, from which 
I tried to address an excited and turbulent 
meeting packed by hired supporters of the 
liquor traffic. Even while the crowd in- 
side was passing a hostile resolution not 
to close the saloons, the piteous crowd 
outside was dragging the river for the body 
of yet another victim of the evil. The 
specialist in physiological chemistry of 
your largest hospital declared not long 
ago, that alcohol is without doubt the 
greatest curse of civilization. I heard re- 
cently at Lowell how the liquor traffic is 
forcing drunkenness just for gain on the 
large Greek quarter, by planting in their 
midst a saloon with a renegade Greek as 
manager. 

Among my own patients was once a 
university graduate, a young married man, 
a millionaire, of brilliant mind, an only son. 



110 THE ADVENTURE OP LIFE 

raving with delirium tremens. Think of 
the misery and wretchedness which even 
his palace could do nothing to mitigate. I 
could duplicate this sort of instance many 
times, and from my own University of Ox- 
ford, showing that education, family, rank, 
and intelligence are no safeguards against 
this danger. 

This question has agitated the public 
mind very seriously for many years. A 
consensus of opinion of our judges holds 
alcohol responsible for nine tenths of oiu* 
crimes. Statisticians have proved that it 
costs more in money than any other earthly 
thing. Philanthropists have shown that 
in mental and bodily suffering it is the most 
expensive modern agent. Physicians are 
equally decided that it is more fruitful in 
disease than any other single poison, or- 
ganic or inorganic. In short, the world 
is at last convinced that as a beverage, it 
is neither necessary nor desirable. But 
alas, no one can prove that mankind can- 
not be trained to like it, and even if we 




CHRIST AND SOCIETY 111 

could prove it, that is not the contribution 
of religion. The contribution of religion is, 
we do like it but we will not touch it, be- 
cause of the stumbling-block it is to others. 
What answer the Christ would give to this 
question, I leave each man who loves his 
brother to settle for himself. His religion 
can never be satisfied anyhow with ''thou 
shalt nots'': something more than that is 
needed for others — but He himself set 
the example of ''I will not.'' 

Too long the idea of the divine revela- 
tion has been that it is like a kind of fairy 
story beginning with ''Once upon a time 
there was''; a passable method for child- 
hood, like milk for babes, but a passing 
one also, and of no use for rapidly growing 
manhood. To be divine at all, revelation 
must be "living." There is too much of 
the flavor of death about "life in abey- 
ance," and to religion the only alternative 
to life is spiritual death. The vital contri- 
bution of the church is, moreover, only 
by the life of its individual members. Not 



112 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

by setting up ideals and talking about 
them, but by being the ideal yourself, will 
you exhibit the treatment of the Master 
for these ills. 

The fact is you yourself are the only 
offering you can make which is undeni- 
able, to this or any other problem. This 
is the true service which love demands of 
you. When religion stands for this. Noble 
Lectures will be unnecessary, and preach- 
ing will once again have reached its climax 
— at its own starting-point. 

I admit that it is only a little of the 
burden at best which any one of us can 
lift, but together we can lift a lot. I was 
once most generously accorded a reception 
by a representative of every church, in- 
cluding some laymen like myself. Amongst 
us were the Catholic priest, the Protestant 
clergy, and the Jewish rabbi. I ventured 
to suggest that if in the centre of our circle 
were placed a visible burden like that of the 
world which needed lifting, we should all 
rush together, and however little each 



CHRIST AND SOCIETY 113 

accomplished, the result would be that the 
whole weight would be raised. 

I have not referred to every question 
of modern life. If I tried to do so, the end 
of these lectures would probably be de- 
livered to empty seats. I should have liked 
to touch upon the problem of world peace 
— a question on which so much thought 
and effort are now being expended. Re- 
ligion has everything to contribute to 
this- 

How to contribute is always a far more 
important question than *'Can I contrib- 
ute ? " and here the function of the minister 
or specialist in service should naturally come 
in. " What can I do to inherit eternal life? '' 
was treated by the Master as a perfectly 
sane question. He never said, " You Ve 
nothing to do.'' Human reason refuses any 
longer to accept the idea that the faith 
which is without works can save anybody. 
The virtuous man is no longer regarded as 
a distinct species from the holy man. For 
my part the social settlements as well as 



114 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

the churches have all my affection, though 
I was once taught to look upon them as a 
positive menace to religion. 

For some years I had the privilege of 
watching at close range the work at Toyn- 
bee Hall in Whitechapel. From the time 
of its inception one thing at least I can 
vouch for, many lives were elevated by their 
efforts, many sufferers relieved, many home- 
less ones cheered, the power of many evil 
men was taken away, the hungry were fed, 
the naked clothed, wrongs were righted, 
hope inculcated, comfort carried, — and 
all these things at great personal cost. 
There was a singular absence of being 
puffed up, of seeking their own, of being 
easily provoked. There is simply no room 
for the sounding of brass and the tinkling 
of cymbals in the modern settlement as I 
have seen it, and my experience seems to 
be similar to that of thoughtful and quite 
unprejudiced people with whom I have 
discussed the matter. I have often thought 
I should value the title of ''Christian" 




CHRIST AND SOCIETY 115 

more if I might be allowed to share it 
with those friends in the settlements. He 
who would say of such, ''Go to, I am holier 
than thou," seems to me to be sufficiently 
presumptuous to risk his own right to 
the title. I know few who could afford to 
throw the first stone at them. The mere 
fact that in a place like Hull House no 
assemblies for public worship are found 
advisable seems to me as sane an argument 
for condemning them as for a similar reason 
condemning the claims of a surgical oper- 
ating theatre or a convalescent ward. Is 
not Hull House truly an operating theatre.^ 
*' There can be no truth of science,'' says 
Paradise, "which is not also a truth of re- 
ligion. There can be no discovery of nature's 
laws which is not also a revelation of God. 
There can be no passion of service to 
mankind which is not also true disciple- 
ship of Jesus Christ." ^ 

I was taught to consider labor move- 
ments as anarchical and atheistic. I have 

* Tlie Church and the Individual. 



116 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

been immensely encouraged to find the 
reverence for the Christ which so many of 
the leaders possess. They are now by no 
means alone, thank God, in realizing that 
idealism must dominate the production of 
wealth as well as its distribution. The finan- 
cial pirate no longer ranks higher in the 
world's estimate than the poor fellow who 
steals a loaf, even if he does subscribe to 
dogmas unknown to the latter. The way- 
ward city juvenile is being treated in an 
intelligent Christian manner, and efforts 
are being made to save his soul, rather than 
merely to punish his body. So also the 
study of scientific sociology and the estab- 
lishment of the new profession of the ex- 
pert sociologist is a Christian advance. 
They are all, after all, only the study of 
how to love your neighbor wisely. 

There is no snobbery in recognizing that 
money has a religious value, and, like time, 
should be put to a religious use. To my 
mind the advice which Jesus gave to the 
rich young man, to sell all he had and give 



CHRIST AND SOCIETY 117 

it to the poor, has, like much else of the 
Master's teaching, been willfully misunder- 
stood. The young man was n't told to make 
a fool of himself, or dump his wealth, or 
injure others by senseless gifts, or that 
every rich man should shirk his responsi- 
bility and put it upon other shoulders. To 
even give away money is a worthy life 
problem, and the world is recognizing it to 
be such; nay, it is not only demanding that 
men shall use their wealth, but that they 
use it wisely. It is perfectly true "that 
the condition for permanence and primacy 
is service, and that knowledge is the con- 
dition of service." There are men, and 
perhaps the rich young man was among 
them, — I know one or two, — whom I would 
certainly class in the category of those 
whom it would be wise to separate from 
their money in order to save their own 
lives. More and more are endeavoring 
wisely to distribute their own wealth 
themselves, and so prevent its doing harm 
and causing waste; and this is ever more 



118 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

and more being demanded of them as a 
religious service. 

As in my last lecture I urged upon you 
the consideration that any manly profes- 
sion may be, nay, to be truly manly must 
be, carried on as a Christian service, in 
this I wish to emphasize a yet higher and 
wider conception — that all social service 
in its broadest sense is but a reasonable 
Christian activity. Not only in his private 
life, but also in his public life, a man may 
bring Christ's dynamic power into the 
community; and only in that way can 
rich and poor, the struggling and those at 
ease, ever hope to behold ''how good and 
pleasant a thing it is to dwell together in 
unity." In that state "there can be no 
truth of science which is not also a truth 
of religion. There can be no discovery of 
nature's laws which is not also a revelation 
of God. There can be no passion of serv- 
ice to mankind which is not also true 
discipleship of Jesus Christ.'' 

The knowledge of God is life; complete 



CHRIST AND SOCIETY 119 

correspondence with him is eternal life. 
To ask what is the contribution of religion 
to life is to ask what life is. Religion can 
contribute to existence, but real religion 
makes Life. 



LECTURE IV 

CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 

In this, my last lecture, I am anxious to 
show that which I most truly believe, 
namely, that all through the ages, all that 
which has been worth while, all that which 
has tended to uplift the world, all that which 
has made for the noblest ends, has been ac- 
complished by the possession of the spirit 
of the Master, if not the profession of his 
service or the knowledge of his name. I 
read a story once by Laura E. Richards, 
called ''The Grumpy Saint." While walking 
along the highway one day he met a poor 
woman staggering under a burden which 
she was not fit to carry. When she asked his 
help, he scolded her for attempting such a 
task, upbraided her husband for permitting 
it, and the world for making it necessary. 
But he took the load and carried it to her 
door. A little farther along he met a child 



CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 121 

who had lost her way and w^as crying with 
fear and cold and hunger. When she asked 
him the way he demanded what the child 
thought he was for! How could he waste 
time? Besides, he did n't know where 
her home was, and in any case it was her 
own fault for being disobedient and run- 
ning away. But he took off his coat and 
wrapped it about the child, and gave her 
the food he had prepared for himself on the 
journey. Then he lifted her up and car- 
ried her, until eventually he left her in her 
mother's arms. Was or was not this man 
a disciple of Jesus Christ.? 

It is with this thought in my mind that 
I have decided, though without any more 
claim to be a historian than a theologian, 
to try to show, though it can be little more 
than a mere suggestion in one brief lec- 
ture, that the records of achievement left 
throughout history by men who are Christ- 
ians by Christ's own standard are such as 
any common-sense person at his best would 
envy. If we understand them rightly, they 



122 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

show us that just in proportion as the men 
had the spirit of Jesus, they were worth 
while; and they teach that if we wish to 
make good in life, we too must aspire to 
gain it. He who, gauged by the Master's 
valuation, deserves of posterity the title 
"Christian,'' has never left behind him a 
record of ineflSciency, On the other hand, 
I want to leave it in your minds as my testi- 
mony that those who are consciously striv- 
ing to follow a Christ whom they know, and 
whom they acknowledge, possess a com- 
pelling power over and above the force of 
those men who have only a passion for 
abstract righteousness, or an innate fine- 
ness of moral calibre. Beyond question the 
Master himself taught this. That is the 
power which has given the world pictures 
like that of James Gilmore of Mongolia, 
absolutely alone crossing the great wall of 
China, and alone wandering on foot along 
the byways of Manchuria, that he might 
reach the hitherto untouched Mongols of 
the desert of Gobi. It was that spirit which 



CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 123 

kept Livingstone in Africa, sent Gordon 
to Khartoum and Father Damien to 
Molokai. These men's lives are valu- 
able heritages for all time, to hold up as 
examples of unselfish courage, exactly as 
Christ's own is. They are an heirloom of 
which any nation may be proud, whether 
or not the men had a correct apprehen- 
sion of absolute truth. 

The Christian of Christ's lifetime was 
a very human person, in direct natural 
communication with the Master. He was 
not peculiar in his dress, his method of 
worship, or his theories of life. He was not 
remarkable for his mysticism, his idealism, 
or any other "isms." He loved and married 
like other folk, and enjoyed the good things 
of life as well as they. He was just a man. 
He could lie like Peter, seek graft like James 
and John, be conceited like Thomas, or 
fail in loyalty like Judas. He was not 
gifted with any peculiar perspicacity. 

None of the disciples apparently, in spite 
of their singular advantages, knew who 



124 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

Christ was, or why he was unlike other 
men in not seeking to save himself. The 
Christian of that day was not, so far as we 
can tell, an intellectual genius or a spiritual 
giant. What Christ made these men we 
all know; and what he made of them he 
can make of us. Fisherman John became 
wise enough to describe the Master as ''the 
Word of God,'' and leave the world mono- 
graphs which will outlive the writings of all 
the sages. Custom-house officer Matthew 
left us a document which even a Hawthorne 
with a similar training in the nineteenth 
century could not parallel. There is no 
reasonable doubt that the courage of 
Simon Peter and his runaway friends, in 
later life, has never been excelled. In their 
tireless bodily work, in their marvellous 
mental productions, in their lofty unselfish 
conduct, in mind, body, and spirit, this 
company of men, through contact with 
Jesus Christ, came to embody all that 
would make any good man wish to be 
ranked of their number. The lofty posi- 



CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 125 

tion which they have occupied in men's 
estimation, and which they still occupy, 
was fully justified, and will, I believe, be 
more and more deeply realized, whatever 
happens in the future to dogmatic theology. 
Their attractiveness was undoubted, for 
everywhere men joined them; not for what 
they could get, for that was seldom attract- 
ive, but for what they could in their turn 
give. It certainly was not so much the 
desire for gain here or hereafter, as the be- 
lief that the Kingdom of God on earth 
could use what they had to contribute, that 
fired men's hearts to loyalty for the or- 
ganization they founded. The mistaken 
idea of the immediate coming of the end 
of the world and the short road to eternal 
bliss was no doubt a comfort and an at- 
traction to them. But it was not their 
Master's teaching as we read it. It is evi- 
dence of the continued human liability to 
error even among those who were the very 
closest to Christ's person. When men were 
near to Christ, they needed nothing but 



126 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

the atmosphere of his spirit to attract them 
to him, but as they got farther and farther 
away from him in spirit and in time, they 
used this doctrine as a bait to compensate 
for the loss involved in this world by be- 
coming his followers. But I will not believe 
it was ever the chief factor in the appeal to 
follow Christ, any more than the promise 
attached to the Fifth Commandment makes 
me honor my father and mother. 

As for the name "Christian,'' it was 
originally given in contempt, and was used 
by men of the world as a stigma and a re- 
proach. From that reproach Christians 
themselves soon redeemed it by displaying 
the spirit of Christ. It came to stand for 
that humility, mercy, and justice which 
the Scripture tells us God calls for still. 
It spelled loyalty, courage, and self-sac- 
rifice; and the world, ever able to recognize 
if not always willing to accept the noblest, 
in a few centuries changed its attitude. 
The Christian knight became the ideal of 
history. 



CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 127 

It was not long, however, before the 
organization of the scattered groups into 
bodies for mutual strength and protection 
began seriously to disturb the minds, not 
only of those who represented the vast 
interests of religion, but of the temporal 
powers as well. Rich as well as poor began 
to feel the force of the call of Jesus, and 
he found followers even in Caesar's house- 
hold. The simplicity and attractiveness 
of the Christian was a protest against evil. 
How is it we seldom see any persecutions 
of modern Christians.'^ It^As certainly not 
because there is no graft in high places. 

When for the first time I wandered 
through the old Coliseum at Rome, it was 
at night, by moonlight, and the spirits of 
the men who had suffered upon the very 
ground I trod seemed almost visible. I, a 
so-called Christian, felt humiliated, not 
repelled. 

Yet persecution never really injured the 
growth of faith in Christ. Those who tried 
to follow in his footsteps grew more and 



128 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

more numerous. Rottenness began from 
within. In the organization itself there 
grew up rank and privilege; talkers began 
to count as higher than workers and claim 
for themselves special proximity to the 
Master. As if Jesus himself had not talked 
far more in works than in words, had not 
laid far more emphasis on works, had not 
devoted far more time to works, and had 
not referred those in doubt to his works as 
his indorsement. This restraint on Christ's 
part from laying down dogmas is more re- 
markable, the longer one thinks about it. 
That sects should still be unable to settle 
whether Saturday or Sunday is the true 
day of rest, that men should be able even 
to attempt to defend slavery, or to try to 
enforce celibacy on the authority of his 
teaching, is evidence of the scope he left 
for individuality by never laying down 
minute rules, but only enunciating general 
principles. 

Yet it is always easier to talk than to do, 
and presumably the cleverer men soon dis- 



CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 129 

covered this. Alas, talking, more especially 
on matters or facts about which we cannot 
appeal to our physical senses, is just as 
likely to divide as doing is certain to unite. 
As late as the Reformation, no theological 
question was too slight to engender hatred, 
and even to provoke civil war. Indeed, 
so began the differences which invented 
"heresy,'' and then councils and creeds to 
define and locate and eradicate it. 

With the advent of classes in the church, 
one ruling and the other serving, social 
differences became easy to justify, and in 
fact almost inevitable. Moreover, it seemed 
suddenly to dawn on the real outsiders, the 
men without the Master's spirit, that Chris- 
tianity was a mighty force, and formed 
a bond between men which was far more 
durable than any involuntary one. It 
only needed careful using and it would 
serve to bolster up temporal as well as 
spiritual power. So gradually was evolved 
the complex and immense structure of the 
Papacy. Eventually there followed in the 



130 THE AD\TENTURE OF LIFE 

name of Christ so fantastic an interpreta- 
tion of his service as the Crusades. What- 
ever the church taught verbally, it practi- 
cally set up at that period the possession 
of property as an object for worship, and 
so at once destroyed the Christ vision of 
the paramount value of life. 

Like the graphic representation of the 
human heart beat on the sphygmographic 
drum, the track of real Christ-following 
through history seems to have risen and 
fallen in a kind of rhythm, though at times, 
like a hectic temperature chart, to have 
been little above the neutral line. Whether 
there will ever be millennial peace on earth, 
or whether the waxing and waning war- 
fare is essential for the evolution of oiu* 
souls' welfare, may be open to question, 
but that the true Christ-following has al- 
ways brought out the heroic in men is not 
open to doubt. It seems somehow that 
conflict is necessary for the perfection of 
character, I know that in navigating our 
coast to-day I feel twice as reliable a pilot 



CHRIST AND THE DAH^Y LIFE 131 

for the bad times I have had on so many 
rocks. 

Anyhow, the organization designed to 
foster and safeguard Christ's Kingdom 
gradually deprived men of all personal 
freedom. The leaders not only ^'suflFered 
themselves to be called Master/' but posi- 
tively liked it, and eventually insisted they 
were so, till the persecutions which they 
themselves instituted against men who 
evinced Christ's spirit were ten times more 
cruel than those instigated by the early 
pagans. The Duke of Alva was a type of 
such men. But in spite of this, the organ- 
ization harbored all the while the living 
germ, without which it must have died, 
and with which, with all its shortcomings, 
it slowly helped to advance the true King- 
dom of God. The germ, however, some- 
times sank to the bottom, like the currants 
in a badly mixed cake, and few managed to 
obtain it. 

The biographies and autobiographies of 
men of action have always been the most 



132 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

attractive literature to me. Whether or 
not they have had the orthodox label, the 
appeal of such lives is just as great and 
must tend to kindle any spark of manliness 
in us — that our brief day of life may also 
be used to some noble purpose. To me it 
has been a thousand times helpful to look 
back upon the story of the centuries, and 
realize how differently men interpret the 
call of God to them, and how varied are 
the services which can be approved as 
^'Christian." It is only the brave efforts 
through the ages of men of that type, men 
often of very ordinary attainments, which 
have even partially given us back our free- 
dom to-day. But we are still far from spirit- 
ually free. Numbers of men and women 
are still tangled up in the meshes and intri- 
cacies of theologies and theories and con- 
ventions. Many are still satisfied to sub- 
mit to external authority instead of their 
individual vision. But if religion is to 
grapple with the social questions of to-day, 
to attract when it can no longer compel, 




CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 133 

and to satisfy the practical minds of mod- 
ern youth, it must come down from heaven 
to earth, and this even though the process 
will involve much heart-burning on the part 
of the theologian, and still some martyr- 
dom on the side of those who break w^ith 
the old order. 

How are men to decide who is a Christian 
or how far the inability to say, "Rabbi, 
thou art the Christ, the Son of God,'* 
made eleven out of twelve disciples for- 
feit their right to the title? For example, 
no body of men will agree as to the claims 
of world-influencing writers like Goethe, 
Shakespeare, or Locke; of scientists who 
have advanced knowledge, like Coperni- 
cus, Newton, or Darwin; of artists who have 
altered the conception of art, like Raphael, 
Michael Angelo, or Da Vinci; of statesmen 
who have changed the course of history, 
like William of Orange or Oliver Cromwell; 
of earnest truth-seeking philosophers so 
different as Plato, Kant, and Spencer; in- 
deed, any of the whole gamut of human 



134 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

beings whose lives have been used for the 
amelioration of the conditions of life on 
earth, and have contributed their quota 
toward making the Kingdom of God more 
possible here and now. We are too apt to 
grudge other people their haloes, and too 
fond of trying to preen our own — a diflS- 
cult matter under any circumstances! Our 
judgment ought surely to depend upon 
what we consider was the Kingdom Christ 
came on earth to found. The Kingdom 
of God for which I am working is an ideal 
world, a world in which the souFs environ- 
ment, which of course includes the body 
in which it dwells, must be made more ideal. 
Even pagans so long ago as the philosopher 
Lucian stated the opinion that the soul is 
as much helped by the flesh as the flesh by 
the soul. Yet it has become necessary for 
both of these truths to be demonstrated 
alongside us in Boston, as if they were new 
discoveries of the twentieth century. They 
seem to have been forgotten or neglected 
by the churches. 



CHRIST AND THE -DAILY LIFE 135 

That is exactly what gives us the fun 
of service — because it includes everything 
we can do to help out. The "joy of serv- 
ice'' is so much exalted in theseMays that 
one might almost suppose there existed 
normally a craving for the joy of useless- 
ness. That is the supreme joy of the bar- 
nacle, who, though born a free-swimming 
animal, prefers even in his youth a life of 
inaction, and after fastening his head to 
a rock spends the remainder of his days 
kicking food into his mouth with his hind 
legs. 

Again, surely we can look upon as dis- 
ciples of the Christ all those who from 
purely patriotic motives have devoted their 
stay on earth to the welfare of their coun- 
try, and at personal risk and sacrifice have 
sought to raise her to their highest ideals. 
Fighting may not be the ideal Christian 
way to gain an end, but we must remember 
that Christ does not judge men by what 
they do not see, but by what they do see. 
Who would not gladly face the supreme 



136 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

tribunal, so far as their patriotism is 
concerned, with the record of Gustavus 
Adolphus, Joan of Arc, Count Cavour, 
Louis Kossuth, the Duke of Wellington, or 
George Washington, and among living men 
the heroes of the Japanese War ? Or, seeing 
the cruel straits and horrible conditions 
inflicted on Germany by Napoleon, who 
would not follow a Stein, a Bismarck, or a 
Moltke? Certainly many of these men 
think themselves Christians just as much as 
we regard ourselves in that light. I was 
reared on stories like that of General 
Havelock and his saints, of Clive and 
Lawrence, of Wolfe and Drake. It will 
probably be long, however, before the 
French believe Bismarck was not lying 
when he said: "If I did not believe Provi- 
dence had destined this nation for some- 
thing great and good, I should at once 
give up my position as a diplomat or 
never have entered on it at all.'' Yet 
human judgment on a Gordon who stayed 
the cruelties of the Taiping Rebellion, or 



CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 137 

a Cromwell who opposed the divine right 
of kings, or even a Lincoln who fought to 
free his fellows from slavery will no doubt 
be different according to the tribunal be- 
fore which they are tried. The right inter- 
pretation of true loyalty must be left 
to each man's conscience. Moses, David, 
and Paul expressed their willingness to be 
castaways themselves if their people might 
be saved. For my part, I can quite con- 
ceive the profession of arms, at any rate 
in the past, as being a religious service, and 
as often seeming to such men the only 
means available for advancing the King- 
dom of God. Centurions were among 
Christ's first followers. Personally, I thank 
God for the view of a wide and ever- 
changing range of service. 

The unendurable miseries of the masses 
at the time of the French Revolution 
called for a Christian champion and found 
none. Surely this was only for lack of the 
vision of their opportunities. Even if the 
churches of any day are no more Christian 



138 THE ADVENTURE OP LIFE 

than the temporal powers, nevertheless, 
God's purposes will be wrought out with- 
out us if we will not help. There can be no 
doubt that the ultimate result of the Re- 
volution was a distinct gain to the kingdom 
of righteousness, joy, and peace, — that 
the present happy and prosperous French 
peasantry was made possible by it, and 
that the lessons it impressed on the rulers 
of the world materially hastened the broader 
brotherhood of man. But had true men 
with the Master's spirit been forthcoming 
to guide the process, who can doubt but 
that the same ends could have been ac- 
complished without the horrors and in- 
famies that the Revolution involved? It 
was Guizot, not an ecclesiastic, who, when 
he fled to England as the only stable throne 
in Europe, said to Lord Shaftesbury, "Sir, 
it is their religion which has saved the 
English nation." 

It sometimes takes catastrophes to show 
the church as Vv^ell as the world the incal- 
culable opportunities to make life worth 



CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 139 

while, which they are constantly throwing 
away. That it is as much the vision as the 
will which men need is shown by the fact 
that only five years before the Revolution 
a French historical philosopher wrote: 
" The political system of Europe has ar- 
rived at perfection. Few reforms are 
needed. There is no need nowadays to 
fear a revolution.'' ^ 

As an absolute antithesis to the services 
of the physical fighter to the Kingdom of 
God, take that of the philosopher, Hugo 
Grotius. Stirred by the wholesale con- 
demnation of people to death for heresy, 
and the frightful cruelties perpetrated on 
the innocent and noncombatants in war, 
he satisfied his passion for service by the 
writing of long books in Latin. By his 
immortal work, ''De Jure Belli et Pacis,'' 
he awakened the world to the Christian 
sense of God's international family, and 
he laid the foundation for all future inter- 
national law. There seems no fear of the 
^ Seven Great Statesmen, 



140 THE ADVENTURE OP LIFE 

overcrowding of this particular branch of 
service to-day; the writing of books in 
Latin is a little out of vogue. But who shall 
doubt that it was a truly Christian service, 
and that the law schools to-day have God- 
like opportunities yet open to them before 
the reign of peace universal. 

It is not part of my scheme to publish a 
schedule of Christian services. In ten thou- 
sand experiences of everyday life we cannot 
fail to see that God not only permits but 
seeks our cooperation in the establishment 
of his Kingdom. If we find this out too 
late and have to look back on a life full of 
opportunities which we have let slip, we can 
have no longer any excuse to mitigate our 
remorse. 

Now that we cannot be forced to do so, 
we no longer admit that God will only make 
his will plain through a third party. God 
certainly does make plain the way of life 
to those who seek it in sincerity and truth. 
We are no longer accountable to human 
authority. Bismarck once rebuked the 



CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 141 

autocratic Wilhelm the First for sneering 
at the word ''pietist/' by saying, "Christ- 
ianity is not the creed of Court chaplains/' 
And the finicking arguments of the religion- 
ists made the great Doctor Jowett of Bal- 
liol, Oxford, once say, "All wise men have 
the same religion, but no wise man will say 
what it is." 

It will surely comfort some who, from 
their evangelical point of view, might be 
troubled with fears that this broad inter- 
pretation was dangerously modern and in- 
compatible with the simple teaching of the 
Gospel, to know that so unquestionable a 
Christian as George Fox taught that "every 
hunger of the heart, every dissatisfaction 
with self, every sense of shortcoming, shows 
that the soul is not unvisited by the Di- 
vine Spirit. To want God at all implies 
some acquaintance with Him.'' In all 
sorts and conditions of men Fox always 
appealed to "that of God," or "the Christ 
within them." We know them by their 
fruits, not by their catechisms. 



142 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

The only real heathen and heretics are 
the purely selfish. It is for our own sakes 
as well as theirs that we desire their con- 
version. For while they are losing all life 
has to give, we are losing the share they 
might contribute. Alas, there are still many 
rich in talents who find it costs too much 
simply to follow the Master. 

For my part, I am so sure that God is 
Love that I never worry a moment about 
whether divine wisdom and power could n't 
have devised an easier road for redemption 
than willing personal service. That to me 
is simply loyalty, and of that quality the 
professing Christian has no monopoly. 

I never believed that following the Mas- 
ter meant having no will of our own. Christ 
had a will of his own. We are ''to stand 
on our feet, and hear what the Lord will say 
to us.'' God wants men with a will. Only 
that will must be linked with God's. Self- 
will and selfishness are always obviously an 
absolute bar to unity between God and 
man and between man and man. I have 



CHRIST AND THE DAH^Y LIFE 143 

always had a holy horror of the teaching 
that the Christian religion calls for a back- 
boneless type of person, the simpering, long- 
haired, eflFeminate creature so familiar in 
"sacred art/' 

Art is no art at all if it is n't sacred, if it 
does n't comfort and uplift. It does n't in- 
spire me to see my ideal of human life, the 
Christian knight, the man of every age and 
every station and every calling who is doing 
God's work, held up to ridicule as a sickly, 
effeminate imbecile. I always pictured the 
Christ at college as captain of the foot- 
ball team, or stroke of the 'Varsity boat, 
or one of the honor men, because these 
were what I wanted to be myself. 

It is this hideous teaching, that secular 
and sacred can be separated, and must be 
labelled so, which formerly made men esti- 
mate the claimants to religion at their own 
valuation: namely, that they were fitted 
for talking, but not for competing in any- 
thing else which pertains to human life, 
and were chiefly remarkable for the things 



144 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

they did not do. " Consecration, not renun- 
ciation, makes the highest character." ^ 

So long as we make the division, so long 
as Christ-following does not mean every 
single method and way that can make this 
world better and brighter, Christ-following 
is robbed of its dignity, its joy, its utility, 
— and its future. 

Let us descend to the concrete for a mo- 
ment. In Labrador it was religious to con- 
duct public worship, to lead a prayer- 
meeting, to marry, to baptize, to bury, to 
take up collections, to foster guilds. It was 
secular to do medical, legal, commercial, or 
any kind of work by which men can earn a 
living. It was religious to visit and condole 
with the hungry. It was very distinctly 
secular to run a cooperative store and 
feed them. It was religious to pray on 
Wednesday night that God would give the 
people a good fishery. It was secular on 
Thursday to make twine cheap, to build a 
bait freezer, and to introduce motor dories. 
^ Doctor Allen. 



CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 145 

It was religious to give old clothing to naked 
families. It was secular to introduce looms, 
sheep, reindeer, and to teach the women to 
weave durable and fitting woolen clothing 
for their families. It was religious to pray 
that God would keep idle folk's hands from 
mischief. It was secular to set to work to 
keep those same hands remuneratively busy. 
Finally, in Labrador, none but ''fossil men" 
wondered why every one wanted to be 
"worldly.'' If Christ's men are to be known 
by their works, surely Christ's work is to 
be known by its efficiency to redeem. 

I have spent now much of your time and 
mine in defending the perfect rationality 
of Christian faith. I have suggested many 
times that like all other things it must be 
accepted or rejected on the ground of its 
practical value. But I realize that it is as a 
surgeon that I am addressing you. I would 
naturally expect you to ask now, ''What are 
the specific things which I can do to gain 
the faith which you consider so valuable.? " 

If I am right and you are looking to these 



146 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

lectures for such advice as I may have to 
give here and now from my own experience, 
I should say first of all cut out whatever sin 
you are conscious of. You will find it an 
immense help to let it be known on which 
side you are. It takes a lot of pluck to do 
that, but it makes a man of one. It is still 
true that '' whosoever would save his life 
shall lose it/' and it must often be at the 
cost of ambition and popularity that the 
door of the Kingdom of Heaven is opened. 

If the certain deterioration of physical 
and mental capacities through dallying in 
the slightest degree with drink and vice 
does not deter men from indulging in them, 
at least if they will follow the Christ they 
will refrain for the sake of making the path 
of righteousness easier for others. 

All through my lectures my attitude 
will have appeared as depreciative to the 
organized churches. Believe me, my criti- 
cisms are the wounds of a friend. I realize 
that the conditions in America to-day are 
not those of England twenty years ago. The 



CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 147 

church certainly is beginning to wake up. 
Its members are realizing that there is a 
loose screw, and are looking about to lo- 
cate it. I believe to-day you will find in 
her that which is essential for your develop- 
ment, namely, constructive work which 
you can do. She will also give you the real- 
ization of spiritual fellowship between your- 
self and God, and between yourself and 
others who are in earnest about life, which 
it is her especial prerogative to afford, and 
of which she should allow no other interest 
to deprive her. Join her and help her. She, 
too, to-day is making for the uplift of hu- 
manity. She needs all you can give; and 
she certainly will give it back to you again 
with interest. 

For my part, I find the world is good. It 
is a most reliable paymaster, whichever 
way you make your investment, and I am 
glad to be in it. Everything seems to have 
a purpose, and from that fact I deduce a 
purposer. The world seems reasonable, and 
therefore likely to end reasonably. Theevo- 



148 THE AD\T:XTURE OF LIFE 

lution of love, the development of intellect, 
the unceasing metabolism of the body, con- 
sidered with the principle of the conserva- 
tion of eneigy, always seemed to me to argue 
against the annihilation of personality. But 
after all, it is only a reasonable service in 
this world, not omniscience, which is asked 
of me. Some men hate the whole universe, 
because they realize how brief the tenure of 
the things they love in life is. But I am no 
pessimist. Knowing that I only stay for a 
time alongside of what I call my property, 
I am still delighted with all I get, enjoying 
immensely the use of it while I have it, and 
believing, as Christ teaches, that so-called 
death cannot rob me of spiritual friendships 
and assets. If I count what I can contribute 
to life, and not what I can get out of it, that 
of itself makes it worth while. The gauge 
is not what we have, but what we do with 
what we have. 

I am as sure that I am not my body as I 
am that I am not my house. But for all that, 
I know that I am I, and that I shall always 



CHRIST AND THE DAH^Y LIFE 149 

continue to be so is sufficiently probable 
to satisfy me. Exactly what will befall me 
hereafter has not yet entered into the heart 
of man. Judging from popular ideas, very 
far from it. 

That men in this world are by no means 
physically equally endowed, every doctor 
knows, and every mother ought to know. 
Christ never taught that they were. He 
insisted only that we should recognize our 
common brotherhood, not that we should 
quarrel about being unequal. As for the 
free-will controversy, Christ taught that 
the only free men are those whom he sets 
free from the slavery of self. Self-service 
was the captivity from which he came to 
set his people free. 

To suppose that all men's intellectual 
capacities are identical is absurd, and yet 
with this premise in a world of utterly im- 
perfect knowledge we play at the solution 
of religious unity, as if, under the circum- 
stances, it could ever be uniformity, either 
in thought or in method of expression. There 



150 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

must ever be endless permutations and com- 
binations when it comes to intellectual ap- 
prehensions. So long as we cling to any hu- 
manly devised definitions, which we insist 
upon as articles of faith necessary to salva- 
tion, we shall inevitably insure discord for 
all time. Together with these initial dif- 
ferences, and with imperfect data, we must 
take into consideration the changes which 
new environments and new experiences 
make in the same individual. Thus for my 
own part I was once absolutely intolerant 
of all forms and ceremonies in public wor- 
ship. Now I expect to value ever more and 
more beauty and orderliness in the expres- 
sion of it. 

At the time of my own decision, twenty- 
five years ago, the current version of the 
doctrine of evolution was a very new and 
staggering idea to every one. But my faith 
was never seriously troubled. Perhaps the 
fact that at that time I was deep in the 
study of anatomy and physiology showed 
me that the temple of man's soul was so 



CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 151 

marvelously adapted to the environment 
of a world like this, that I saw no reason 
why we should have expected, as Balfour 
has since suggested, that just because a 
similar form suited lower animals, some 
new design ought to have been devised for 
us. Further, evolutionists argued, not only 
that all improvements in physical conditions 
were attained by intellectual processes such 
as the Davy safety lamp, or Jenner's vac- 
cine, merely fortuitous advances further 
fitting our race for survival, but also that 
every disinterested motive, every spiritual 
impulse was just one more device for the 
same end. I never could believe such good 
fruit could come from such unpromising 
trees. Anyhow, I did n't want to believe 
it, for the boys I was teaching at that time 
needed no encouragement to go and steal 
the jam, as I found more than once at our 
annual summer encampment. 

Materialism has shot its bolt anyway, 
and of late the pendulum has swung the 
other way. The new knowledge of the 



152 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

periodic law, the divisibility of the atom, 
the possible identity and intermutability of 
what we used to consider elements, the hypo- 
thesis that all matter is only after all a form 
of electricity or motion, the discovery of ra- 
dium and the suggestion of the possibility 
of perpetual motion, all show us that of all 
the ways in which we interpret Scripture, 
none can possibly be considered final. Or- 
thodox Christianity has suffered a good deal 
from lack of humility, but our scientific 
friends have little to boast of in that direc- 
tion. 

Because no one has been able to compre- 
hend the doctrine of the Atonement, or to 
compress the definition of it into words, I 
see no reason to reject it, or for me to be 
anxious for those who fail to accept it. De- 
finitions and doctrines, anyhow, were never 
vital to my faith. The realization of a living 
Christ, with all that that implies, seems all 
that he expected of me. Just to live, "as 
seeing him who is invisible," is my one ideal 
which embraces all the lesser ideals of my 



CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 153 

life; to do in all circumstances what I think 
he would do in my place, not what he would 
have done in Judaea two thousand years 
ago. There was no temptation to waste 
golden hours over bridge-whist in those 
days. 

The expression of my religion has to be 
practical to satisfy me, though I have no 
doubt whatever of the religion of those 
w^ho are satisfied with mystical experiences 
alone. I quite realize that my faith is only 
faith. But I know that every one has to 
begin all knowledge with faith. My faith 
is only my base for action, as is every one's 
else. Moreover, it is the only possible base. 
The faith of exceedingly fallible senses is 
at the bottom of all actions. It is a marvel 
that we get on as well as we do, seeing that 
the evidence of our senses so frequently de- 
ceives us. In reality they afford us no road 
at all by which to arrive at truth. 

To act on faith seems to me to be on surer 
ground, and I try to strengthen it by read- 
ing my Bible with common sense. I am 



154 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

glad to believe that his faith gave Barti- 
meus his eyesight, — especially for Barti- 
meus' sake, — for the value to me to-day of 
a single cure done nineteen hundred years 
ago is problematical, unless it teaches me 
how to repeat it. But I believe my faith not 
only made me see, but what is more, I do 
actually believe it has enabled me to help 
others to their vision, both physically and 
mentally. 

But what is the use of all this talking! I 
would not cross the road, much less come 
all the way from Labrador, unless I felt 
there was some desirable end which might 
be reached thereby. The object of the Noble 
Lectures, as I have said, seemed to me a 
decidedly practical one, namely, to induce 
in the minds of the hearers a keener desire 
to stand in life for just those things that 
Christ stood for, to beget a determination 
to reincarnate his life, and so attain the 
whole achievement of which ours is capable. 

How far this effort has been successful 
only God knows. I have worried you with 



CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 155 

long lists of names of men and the long re- 
cords of deductions from other lives than 
mine, solely because it seemed to me that 
the best way to advocate the adoption of 
principles is to illustrate their effect in ac- 
tion. Moreover, it is only from the em- 
pirical standpoint that I, a physician from 
the confines of civilization, venture to ad- 
dress you in this metropolis of all philo- 
sophies. The knowledge of the immense 
factor in public life which your universities 
have become was an additional incentive, 
emboldening me to accept the invitation 
you extended. 

I have seen the results of the change of 
attitude of the exponents of Christ's relig- 
ion from the controversial and tyrannical 
methods of so many centuries back to the 
brotherly methods of the Master; from 
the failure of their attempts to be their 
brother's keeper, to success in becoming 
their brother's brother. And to-day, ten 
times more than ever before, I am an op- 
timist as to the future. In spite of the in- 



156 THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 

crease of Dreadnoughts and superdread- 
noughts, I seem to see a distinct moral 
progress in the relation of nations to one 
another, and in the new social movement 
opportunities and improvement in the rela- 
tion of man to man. Experience has taught 
me what a blessing for the real ills of hu- 
manity this promises. Surely I may plead 
that it is as compelling a force to a physi- 
cian, this desire to give to others the bene- 
fits of a remedy he has come to value so 
highly himself, as is any professional oath 
he may have taken to keep secret no treat- 
ment he uses for physical ailments. Pos- 
terity has nothing but blame for a Morton 
who tried to patent the discovery of ether 
for his own benefit. 

If our eyes are only open for vision, in 
ten thousand daily experiences we cannot 
fail to see opportunities for what we can 
give. We shall see God himself, not waiting 
for us to be good, but seeking our coopera- 
tion just where we stand, in the establish- 
ment of his Kingdom. What could be more 



CHRIST AND THE DAILY LIFE 157 

terrible than to have to look back upon a 
life of opportunities, as is that of each of 
you, all of which we had let slip ! 

This experience brings me here to-day to 
try to induce you to accept as your life 
axiom, not merely that God was once re- 
incarnated in human life, as an emotional 
submission, but that as an everyday matter 
of fact Christ walks in our streets to-day, 
and can again prove his divinity to us be- 
yond question if we will permit him, by 
living in our human lives. There is no life 
but the life which comes from him; to me, 
as I have said, the rest is merely existence. 
The reason that Christ came was that we 
might have life, here and now, and that 
we might have it more and more abun- 
dantly. 

THE END 



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